Images Re-Vues (Sep 2020)

L’œil inverti

  • Damien Delille

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17

Abstract

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It is at the heart of the first openly homosexual publications at the beginning of the 20th century that a male homoerotic feeling emerges between the lines and images. The study of the German magazine Der Eigene and the French Akademos offers a fledgling vision of gay beauty canons that in turn feeds aesthetic debates on the origin and development of artists' homoerotic feeling. Against the backdrop of psychopathological discourses condemning homosexuality, homoeroticism becomes a means of circumventing the sexual ban and sublimating it through art. This article aims to contextualize these oppositions through two conceptions of modern homosexuality: on the one hand, the theory of the androgynous and effeminate third sex, and on the other, the masculinist theses of virile and misogynistic friendship. These two seemingly contradictory paths guide the critical reception of the artistic, photographic, and illustrated productions contained in these journals. They announce a historical reflection extended to the Italian Renaissance and consolidate the sharing of nascent homosexual sensibilities, of which visuality becomes an essential driving force.

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