Coded Masculinities, Diverted Masculinities
In the visual culture inherited from the Renaissance, the nude male body became the absolute norm, exalting strength and heroism while repressing fragility and intimacy between men. This legacy, carried through academic art and media, confined gender into reductive roles. By reintroducing into these representations qualities culturally coded as “feminine,” I open a space where masculine and feminine become shared resources — blurred, recomposed, and reinvented.
In Renaissance visual culture, the nude male body occupied a central place. Presented as a model of perfection, a symbol of divine order and the incarnation of a universal ideal, it became the measure of all things. It was not the female body that served as a reference to the divine, but the male body, considered the closest expression of truth and harmony.
This valorization is eminently ideological: it reflected a social and religious hierarchy in which masculinity dominated and imposed itself as the absolute norm. Multiplied in art, images of nude men did not represent an openness to a plurality of desires but were inscribed within a strictly heteronormative framework. The male body was highlighted only insofar as it expressed strength, mastery, virility, and heroism. These qualities certainly exist in women as well, but their symbolic monopoly assigned to men served to justify a discourse of superiority and domination.
As Christian society severely condemned homosexuality, desire between men had to remain invisible. The gaze upon the male body always had to be justified by a “noble” function: anatomy, aesthetics, or spirituality. Non-conforming sensibilities — fragility, sensuality, intimacy between men — were repressed or deemed threatening. This system imposed a single model of man, heroic and powerful, excluding any other way of being masculine.
These stereotypes not only curtailed plural expressions of masculinity: by assigning women attributes such as gentleness, modesty, or maternity, they also constructed a patriarchal order that reduced both men and women. So-called “virile” or “feminine” qualities in fact belong to everyone, yet their cultural distribution and hierarchy confined both sexes to narrow and unequal roles.
This visual legacy, transmitted from academic art to modern media, thus reinforced a compartmentalized conception of gender. Yet, however rigid, it can become material for subversion. By taking up these stereotypes and working them from within, one can expose their contradictions and crack their authority.
It seems to me that an interesting approach is to introduce into these representations qualities that cultural history has coded as “feminine”: gentleness, sensuality, vulnerability, fluidity. These attributes, far from belonging to one gender, once reinjected into images of virility, become levers of destabilization. The male body, usually fixed in power and control, then becomes traversed by nuances of intimacy, delicacy, and sensitivity — and this intimacy gains even greater force by being expressed between men, of the same sex, in a realm where dominant culture had established an almost inviolable taboo.
This blurring acts as a critical method. It shows that the oppositions between masculine and feminine are not natural but constructed, and that they stand only by excluding countless possibilities. The image ceases to be the illustration of a virile essence and becomes a fertile space of conflict, where the arbitrariness of stereotypes is exposed and other ways of being — man, woman, or beyond these categories — can emerge.
By bringing together strength and vulnerability, heroism and sensuality, virility and tenderness, my images transform heteronormative heritage into a tool of questioning. They refuse to celebrate a single ideal — whether masculine or feminine — and instead invent a space where codes are blurred and recomposed.
The result is not only aesthetic: it is political. These works reveal the contingency of “superior” masculinity, restore a place for homoeroticism and male sensitivity, and remind us how gender stereotypes confine both men and women to reductive roles. They open an imaginary where masculine and feminine cease to be constraints and become shared resources, to be diverted and reinvented.
