Foucauldian muscles: celebrating the male body in Thom Fitzgerald's Beefcake

Film Criticism, Winter, 2005 by Gilad Padva

The male body, and the gay male body in particular, exposed in magazines, Internet websites, posters, postcards, dance clubs, and shows, is directly involved in a political field. Beyond its erotic, stimulating, and consumerist character, the physique image, as an art and business of self-expression, of striving for beauty, and as a common field of interest for gay men, is interrelated with radical body politics. Michel Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish (1977) that power relations have an immediate hold upon the body; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. The importance of erotic and sexed body imageries to the constitution and construction of queer countercultures, in particular, has been theorized by many scholars (Mills and Russ; Waugh 1996, 2000; Dyer, 1992, 2002; Champagne, 1995, 2000; Hooven; Jackson; Cooper; Weiermair; Leddick; Gross and Woods; Pronger, 1990, 2000).

The ultimate expression of a minority group's independence from the mainstream is its creation and consumption of its own media images. And the existence of alternative sexual images, including explicit erotic imagery, is a threat to those who maintain and reconfirm the sexual reservation. Visible lesbian or gay (or any queer) sexuality undermines the unquestioned normalcy of the status quo and opens up the possibility of making choices that people might never have otherwise considered (Gross and Woods). As Foucault points out, sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies (102).

Tom Fitzgerald's film Beefcake (Canada, 1995) visualizes and dramatizes the story of Bob Mizer's physique photography: the beginning of the all-male erotic magazine Physique Pictorial in conservative Los Angeles in the mid 1940s, the establishment of AMG (Athletic Model Guild)--an agency of male models for painters and photographers, his sensational trial, and his power relations with his mother (Carroll Godsman) and with his muscular young models until the late 1980s. At the beginning of his career, Mizer advertised his service in men's magazines, but after a crackdown by the US Post Office, which refused to distribute any material deemed "morally suspect," many of the individual photographers could no longer rely on the system to get their work to their clients. Bob, always keeping his business .just inside the law, made the move of attaching these photographers' work to his own, which looked like a magazine, and sending them out to the hundreds of subscribers on his mailing list (Hudson). The magazine ostensibly offered bodybuilding tips and moral guidance to young men the world over, but in reality its clientele included legions of gay men eager for eye candy (Dillard).

Fitzgerlad's cinematic portrait of Mizer combines current interviews, authentic AMG footage, and docu-dramatized scenes into a postmodernist hybrid. Further, the style of the film is similar to Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie's Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (Canada, 1992), where interviews with women who were out in clubs during the 1950s and 1960s were blended with a lesbian pulp romance. Beefcake's period-style art design and narration maintains a nostalgic atmosphere for most of the film. As an alternative (micro)history of sexuality, this film integrates diverse cinematic genres, e.g. docudrama, melodrama, court drama, soap opera, music video and documentary, in order to reveal Mizer's controversial character and his continuous efforts to constitute and maintain a subcultural and counter-cultural sphere of gay visibility and erotica. Cagle (2000) notes that Physique Pictorial was, for some time, the only widely available publication to feature racy he-man photos of men, and became the Playgirl or Blueboy of its time; Mizer's sensitivity to this fact was evidenced in his tendency to construct his models as icons of gay male erotica: sailors, bikers, soldiers, etc.

The film, inspired by E Valentine Hooven III's book Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America (1995), emphasizes the importance of sexed images in the, comprehension and acceptance of one's sexuality and the constitution of queer counter-culture and body subculture. Some of the men interviewed in the film emphasize that purchasing such a magazine was a courageous and emancipating act for them. Hooven, for example, confesses that as a 12 year old Texan, in 1957, he found it very intimidating to buy this magazine at the local newsstand. Having gathered his courage, he would purchase a comic, then hide the smiling bodybuilders inside. "And then," he remembers, "I knew I was not alone."

Pornographic Muscles and Political Masturbation

Thomas Waugh (1996) argues that the gay community's most important political activity of the postwar decades, statistically at least, lay not in meeting or organizing or publicly demonstrating but in consuming as readers of these images. Waugh notes that the consumption of homoerotica was without question political: however furtive, however unconscious, however masturbatory, using pictures was an act of belonging to a community composed of producers, models and, most importantly, other consumers. The explicit all-male imageries functioned here as an erotic resistance to heterocentrist mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex. Foucault (1980 [1976]) suggests that sexuality, however, must not be thought of as a kind of natural given that power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain that knowledge tries gradually to uncover. Rather, he regards sexuality as a historical construct, a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledge, and the strengthening of controls and resistances are linked to one another in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power (105-106).