ABSTRACT
The embrace of bodily porosity that defines gay “pig” masculinities brings with it some important challenges to the ways in which masculinity and the male body have been conceived throughout European modernity. In this chapter, I explore those challenges by drawing from the work of French writers Guillaume Dustan and Érik Rémès, the gay erotic art of Bastille and Marc Martin, pornography, and interviews I conducted with gay men, as well as philosophy, political theory, anthropology, art history, and literary criticism. If the project of European bourgeois modernity was sustained through the construction of an idealised male body that—in being autonomous, able to reason, and hermetically closed to its outside—also functioned as a model for the body politic of the modern nation-state, the radical openness and porosity of gay “pig” masculinities offer us a form of embodied subjectivity that inhabits the thresholds of distinctions between mind and body, inside and outside, human and animal, cleanliness and dirt, male and female, life and death, and health and disease, all of which have sustained the development and hegemony of the bourgeois body, its thinking, subjectivity, and the sphere of the politically possible.
