Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities

Figure 1. Male bodybuilders from the Physical Culture Society of Montreal posing semi-naked with their trainer in a photo (Public Domain)

This article explores the gendered construction of disgust, and analyzes how it plays out in Peter Vack's 2017 directorial-debut Assholes. Based on feminist and queer scholarship on abjection, disgust, and the social construction of bodies and sexualities, this article aims to delve into how Assholes frames the relationship between disgust and masculinity, as it shifts how gendered bodily boundaries are played onscreen. The movie's un-shaming of women's bodily functions and fluids directly impacts its representation of disgust and masculinity; it destabilizes the discourses that have framed normative—white, heterosexual, and able-bodied—masculinity as non-disgusting; and it establishes that normative male bodies can, too, become abject.

In an increasingly digitized modernity, traditional societal tropes are vulnerable to rapid and substantial change. Social media platforms such as Instagram allow for digital selves to be constructed in a landscape made up of networks of like-minded individual actors. This article examines how traditional Western notions of masculinity are beginning to change through this enactment of digital relations. Built on 24 months of digital ethnographic fieldwork with sartorially inclined men on Instagram, this article examines how the consumption and production of digital images can alter notions of self, and what this means for those of us who compulsively use social media. This leads to a call for a radical reassessment of masculinity by asking whether the concept of specific forms of masculinity has begun to shatter. If, as this article claims, masculinity has lost specificity in the digital age, then a new type of man has been born: the post-particular man.

D. H. Lawrence once said: “How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.” I was raised with an understanding of a connection between sport and masculinity that insidiously created within me a performative ideology that took years to even recognize. And unfortunately, those that I grew up with were also inoculated with this essentialist understanding of masculinity. This understanding of maleness I was expected to internalize was so pervasive and powerful that it became much like what Sandra Lee Bartky described for those searching for femininity—a normative perspective everywhere and nowhere dictated by everyone and yet no one in particular—thereby making the acquisition of the organically and personally achieved maleness alluded to by Lawrence nearly impossible.

Through hegemonic ideas about muscles and extraordinary performances, image- and performance-enhancing drugs (IPEDs) and their use have been traditionally connected to hypersexualized masculinities. This link has resulted in spectacular ideas and fantasies about what IPEDs can do to/with men regarding their bodies and sexual performance. However, these ideas do not always manifest or correspond with daily life. Using a qualitative and case-study-based approach, this article investigates the relationship between doped and spectacular masculinities as they are presented and constructed in and through an online doping community, and users’ experiences of side effects of the doped body and its social consequences. Analytically, the article draws on Guy Debord's work on the relationship between the spectacle and the real, and the ongoing theoretical debate on different reconfigurations and redefinitions of doped masculinities. It argues that anticipations of and effects from IPEDs can bring alternative ways of enacting doping masculinity and sexuality in the context of online communication while also blurring the lines between fantasy and lived experience.

The Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities is thrilled and honored to present this expansive and profound Book Forum on João Florêncio's Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (2022) as part of the celebration of the release of the paperback edition of the book. It is truly a joy and privilege to be able to be a part of this event and to be able to share these responses that are, each in their own way, far beyond any expectation, elucidating not only the measure and success of the book, but charting out—as all good engagements must—entire worlds that are yet to be created, yet to be explored or terraformed, worlds beyond the imagination that are being brought to life in the fogged-up mirror as one breathes out, in the slide of water between fingers on uneven ground.

Massimo Recalcati, The Enduring Kiss: Seven Short Lessons on Love (Polity, 2021) 97 pp. ISBN: 9781509542482 $19.95 paperback.