Foucauldian Muscles: Celebrating the Male Body in Thom Fitzgerald's Beefcake‪.‬

The male body, and the gay male body in particular, exposed in magazines, Internet websites, posters, postcards, dance clubs, and shows, is directly involved in a political field. Beyond its erotic, stimulating, and consumerist character, the physique image, as an art and business of self-expression, of striving for beauty, and as a common field of interest for gay men, is interrelated with radical body politics. Michel Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish (1977) that power relations have an immediate hold upon the body; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. The importance of erotic and sexed body imageries to the constitution and construction of queer countercultures, in particular, has been theorized by many scholars (Mills and Russ; Waugh 1996, 2000; Dyer, 1992, 2002; Champagne, 1995, 2000; Hooven; Jackson; Cooper; Weiermair; Leddick; Gross and Woods; Pronger, 1990, 2000). The ultimate expression of a minority group's independence from the mainstream is its creation and consumption of its own media images. And the existence of alternative sexual images, including explicit erotic imagery, is a threat to those who maintain and reconfirm the sexual reservation. Visible lesbian or gay (or any queer) sexuality undermines the unquestioned normalcy of the status quo and opens up the possibility of making choices that people might never have otherwise considered (Gross and Woods). As Foucault points out, sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies (102).