ABSTRACT
Butt proves to be part of a pornographic tradition in that it initially anchors the pictorial representation of naked male bodies in a stable relationship between gender and sex. A gay sexual subculture precisely consists of reworking these ideological prescriptions without sacrificing the erotic value of masculinity and maleness. In the wake of psychoanalysis and its queer readings, two strategies are known to negotiate this conflict: Either by identifying the representation of masculinity as mask-like, or by repeatedly exposing (dominant) masculinity's claim to authenticity to its own destruction. With Butt's nonchalant, affectionate men, however, a different picture emerges that can be decoded neither via the conspicuous performativity of gender, nor via a dramatic dialectic between the corrosion of the male ego and its recurring self-assertion. In order to develop a third perspective, a difference between masculinity as gender and maleness as sex must be maintained. Not so as to give validity to maleness as a realm of the natural beyond cultural articulations, but rather to understand maleness beyond pornographic conventionality as a zone of aesthetic design that is not completely regulated by orders of signification. In Butt, the materiality of maleness becomes the site of the transgression of masculinity: male becoming.
