Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art has dedicated its latest issue to the theme of ‘Masculinities’. This is a timely contribution to debates about the construction of male identity in visual and popular culture in the wake of Brokeback Mountain. The controversy this film has generated has focused on the love affair between two cowboys and the threat seemingly posed to an archetypal bastion of manhood, but if you remove the queer element, you have a work that isn’t so different from conventional films such as The Man from Snowy River. A similar quandary is posed by Ross Moore’s standout essay on James Gleeson and the ‘de-gayification’ of his paintings by art writers. Gleeson may have avoided decades of controversy, but delete the queer reading from his imagery and he becomes unproblematically Australia’s greatest surrealist painter.
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