ABSTRACT
A 1994 advertisement for Gay Games IV, the gay and lesbian "Olympics," features five athletes—three men and two women—smiling cheerfully, their gazes directed upward toward a point outside the frame, the head of the implied viewer. This chapter offers a few preliminary suggestions concerning how gender might operate as one of Michel Foucault's fourth types of technology. It aims to propose creating an understanding of masculinity as what Foucault terms a practice of the self. Foucault responds: "The morphologically eroticized man would be, in effect, the homosexual with a mustache, at least thirty-five years old, built like a baseball player, with a lot of body hair, leather, and chains. Masculinity acts as a technology that allows the male homosexual subject to fashion for himself, out of the patterns proposed and imposed on him by his historical and cultural circumstances, a stylistics of life.
