‘시각적 즐거움’과 남성 누드 -존 오라일리의 1980년대 ‘거장들의 화실 시리즈’를 중심으로

Abstract

Laura Mulvey’s much-cited work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) has been one of the most influential articles for scholars, especially feminist art historians and film critics, examining the relationship among the viewer’s gaze, sexually potent images of women, and the outcome of desire. Mulvey’s famous formulation of a gender binary in visual dynamics between the active male and passive female, first propounded in the early 1970s during the heyday of feminist activism in North America and Great Britain, has been widely accepted, revisited, and revived for more than three decades. By examining John O’Reilly’s 1980s photography in light of the key distinctions and definitions within Mulvey’s theory, this paper aims to revisit as well as revive Mulvey’s theoretical position. On the one hand, the male nude in O’Reilly’s photographs, as both the active agent of seeing and the passive object of being seen can serve as an important counter-example to Mulvey’s relatively rigid gender binary. The image of the naked male body subjected to a homoerotic gaze further complicates Mulvey’s scheme, which is strictly rooted in a heterosexual paradigm. On the other hand, Mulvey’s articulation of the patriarchal male subject as the ultimate agent of seeing and desiring the naked (female) body is also helpful in revisiting the ambiguous nature of O’Reilly’s male nude; his subjects are not only exposed to the outside gaze, a position that is only allowable to the female body in Mulvey’s theory, but also committed to showing their process of forming the male subject, including the process of “alienation.” According to renowned French psychologist Jacques Lacan, in achieving the full accommodation of subjectivity, a male child should experience a rupture and fragmentation between the ideal image of the self and the actual body perceived, rather than a sense of wholeness as a subject. This is an interesting point, as Mulvey, a feminist film critic, ultimately intends to deconstruct the patriarchal male subject behind the systematic gender binary and hierarchy in the arena of film; likewise, O’Reilly, a photographer primarily dealing with male nudes strongly imbued with homoerotic connotations, intends to revisit the idea of the perfect, powerful, and consistent (heterosexual) male ego. By freeing the male nude from the traditional framework of patriarchal male subjectivity and bringing discourses of sexual pleasure to the male body—pleasure that has been exclusive to the interpretation of the female body in art history—this paper will ultimately expand discourses about the male body. As many feminist theorists and art historians have raised their voices, the male body has been alienated from discussions about masculinity and male subjectivity, and therefore taking the male body as a serious scholarly subject could be the first step toward the full deconstruction of a masculinity that has remained behind the veil and arcane in the name of neutrality.