July 25, 2006
Eroded Emblems: Boy Bodies in the Late 20th Century West
The bodied boy is to be distinguished from a number of other icons by which it may seem to be eclipsed (and confused) for most parts of the modern era; among these: “the child-body”, the “masculine body”, and the pedagogical (entitled) body.
This is already an important part of the analysis. The default gaze tends to behold male/masculine children/youth/adolescents: products of an historicizeable analytic intervention, of a reductive studium..a composition legitimized in terms of the logic rather than the cause of political status quo.The part of this historical question I want to focus on is what the image of “the boy” is allowed to represent, how it is emblematically deployed.
The OED allows that an emblem denotes “A picture of an object (or the object itself) serving as a symbolical representation of an abstract quality, an action, stateof things, class of persons, etc.” I am particularly stressing the visual and projective aspect of the body as an arena of ideological struggle and display.
article: http://www.boyhoodstudies.com/Janssen_CB2006.pdf (12pp)
by Diederik F. Janssen, MD, BA
from http://www.boyhoodstudies.com/index.htm
[photo private\ not from article]