Self-Organizing Man

On the one hand I’m very excited about some of the work being exhibited here. On the other hand, I wonder why, in the 21st century, the curators have a seemingly very white, mostly masculine show. Here I’m using masculine in a way very, well, seemingly unimaginative manner.

The following part of the program seems a good point of departure, though there is only one piece like this one:

POOR GUYS DO IT BETTER. “ETHNIC GAY PORNOGRAPHY” AND CLASS Maxime Cervulle Many understandings of what became know as “ethnic gay pornography” – sexually-charged products in which males from racial minorities are constituted as a source of visual pleasure – have led us to believe that this mode of representation relied essentially on race, commodifying and eroticizing an “otherness” (i.e. the so-called “racial difference”) it contributed to shape and (re)produce. However, when questioning the construction of sexual fantasies within these films, we discover we might as well take the question from a different angle by hypothesizing that eroticism is mainly produced through class. Allowing us to inscribe “ethnic pornography” in a larger context of working-class eroticism much present in gay porn history, this perspective shows us how deeply middle-classed the “gay gaze” might be. Anchoring this study in the peculiar context of France’s contemporary gay pornography, we’ll see how class, through its complex articulation with race, gender, sexuality or nationalism shapes working-class males bodies for the erotic pleasure of gay audiences craving for exotic fun.

Maxime Cervulle is currently working on a PhD on white identity and cinematic representation at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and teaches media and cultural studies at the University of Lille 3 Charles-de-Gaulle. He has written several articles on pornography and identity and has translated into French works from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler and Teresa de Lauretis.

Radical art - even art that purports to discuss porn and semen and penises - can actually challenge nothing.  I don’t know if this show is radical or not. Sometimes we caught up in talking about how radical we are, and we forget to do radical work.