Eyes at the Back of His Head: Precarious Masculinity and the Modern Tracking Shot

This paper examines masculinity in relation to the modern tracking shot in Daren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008) and Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). These films make prominent use of a particular tracking shot in which the camera floats behind a male character, his head neatly centred in the frame. The camera in these ‘follow-shots’ seems unmistakably but loosely tethered to the character's body. This paper attempts to ascertain the phenomenological nature and critical significance of that relationship, which in recent films expresses the intimate distance and dissonance between mobile cameras, masculinity and the male body in the twenty-first century.

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The Violent Weight of Whiteness

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190236953.013.14 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

George Yancy

Keyword(s):

Lived Experience ◽

Black Male ◽

Body Politic ◽

The State ◽

First Century ◽

Male Body ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

A Site ◽

White Hegemony

What is the lived experience of the black male body within the context of white America in the twenty-first century? How can we describe the deep existential and psychic dimensions of black male bodies as they negotiate their lives within the context of white hegemony? How do their bodies continue to be truncated according to a distorted and racist imago in the white imaginary? The black male body, within the context of this white imaginary, constitutes a site of “contamination.” As such, then, within the white body politic, black male bodies are thereby always already targets of the state, deemed “criminals,” “monsters,” and “thugs.” Textual testimony, coupled with social, political, and existential phenomenological analyses, demonstrates the sheer gravity of being black and male in a mythical postrace America.

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Corporeal Intentions

10.5406/illinois/9780252038273.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Stephen Amico

Keyword(s):

Gay Men ◽

First Century ◽

Male Body ◽

Male Homosexuality ◽

The Gaze ◽

Eurovision Song Contest ◽

The Feminine ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Physical Beauty

This chapter explores how male homosexuality is suggested via the presentation of the sexualized male body as object of the gaze—an objectifying gaze placing the male in the position of the “feminine.” It looks at the efflorescence of images of male physical beauty in the musical discourses of numerous singers and bands in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in Russia and how these images were conflated with homosexuality or homoeroticism. To this end, the chapter examines instances of the male body's foregrounding in the work of Andrei Danilko, the groups Hi-Fi and Smash!!, and singer Dima Bilan (focusing on his appearances at the Eurovision Song Contest). It highlights not only the variable of the body's visibility (and, concomitantly, questions of power), but also the interrelated and phenomenologically inflected dynamics of intentionality, proximity, and orientation. It shows that visible male bodies, invoking the possibility of the homosexual, provide a sight/site for Russian gay men and also serve the goluboi.

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