Presentation Title: “In Search of an Ideal Male Aesthetic?: An Interdisciplinary Look at Male Body Images and Pop-Culture”

Abstracts: Like all cultural constructs, the ideal male form, typified by Adonis-like actors and models, is an arbitrary product of a collective imagination. It is, at best, an average of many images that have been elevated to a position of cultural authority, at worst, a means of capitalist exploitation. Indeed, some cultures might even consider the increasingly globalized Western ideal of the male form a tool for cultural hegemony and oppression. This panel will evaluate male body images in popular culture from a number of academic disciplines including (but not limited to) Islamic studies, clinical psychology, art history, and literary theory. With a post-modern understanding that all cultural artifacts can be valuable discursive contributors, this panel seeks to open up multi-disciplinary readings of representations of the male form in all spectra of popular media and investigate the social and psychological repercussions of these recurring representations. Questions include: What is the contemporary male aesthetic and how is it presented in popular contexts? In what ways do men attempt to realize these ideal representations of the male form? And finally, how do men perceive their bodies against, in addition to, and within this aesthetic discourse?

Daniel Sheras (Spalding University; Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology)
“Mind and the Male Body: An examination of psychological factors related to male body image self-perception”
The media appears to play a significant role in some men’s desire to look stronger, bigger, thinner or more attractive, but why are some men affected by these messages more than others? There are numerous psychological variables that can affect the way a boy or man reacts to these messages from the media. This paper will examine how certain psychological characteristics/disorders and environmental influences can interact in a way that leads some men to take radical measures to change their bodies.

Patrick Brugh (Washington University in St. Louis; Doctoral Program in Germanic Languages and Literatures/Women and Gender Studies)
“Buying a Body: A Marxist critique of the contemporary male aesthetic”
While the technology of pharmacological and surgical body alteration is relatively new, the aesthetic upon which these medical and capitalist practices are based is not. In fact, aesthetic perceptions of the male form have not changed significantly since Winckelmann’s “rediscovery” of the classical ideal male body in the 18th century. This paper will engage in a Marxist criticism of contemporary commercial exploitation of a two hundred year old aesthetic model that turns the male body into social and economic capital and machine.

Nathan French (Washington University in St. Louis; M.A. Islamic Studies/Religious Studies)
“The Veiled Warrior: Photographic self-stylization of Mujahadeen fighters as a criticism of Western cultural hegemony”
Following the dispersal of the Taliban from Kabul, a number of unique photographs depicting Taliban soldiers in carefully constructed veiled poses began to emerge. Considering the strict legal codes forbidding the human image enforced by Taliban—as evinced by their detonation of a centuries-old Buddhist shrine in the spring of 2000—this usage of photographs was certainly surprising. The production of these images by the Taliban, and other Islamic resistance movements, might reflect a number of separate discourses, most notably the unique relationship between discourses of religion and culture and the usage of such discourses to resist the hegemony of the idealized male form both of the West and of Islam. This paper will examine the complex interplay of Islam and power through a Foucauldian critique of the relationship between language, discourse, and power.

In search of the following fields: Art History, Sociology, Anthropology, Medicine, or Film Studies

Biographies: Patrick Brugh is a second year graduate student in Germanic Languages and Literature at Washington University in St. Louis and is currently completing his master's thesis on representations of the Thirty Years War. He holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in English and German Literature. His academic interests include the early modern, gender and aesthetic theory, and the literature of war and revolution.

Nathan French is completing his Master’s degree in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. He is currently working on paradigms of postmodern discourse in Islamic Scholastic writings and applying to doctoral programs in Religious Studies.

Daniel Sheras is a third-year doctoral student in the School of Professional Psychology at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His clinical experience includes psychodiagnostic assessment externships at a residential treatment center and state child protection agency and a psychotherapy externship at a high school counseling center. His areas of clinical interest include child, adolescent and family therapy and his academic/research interests include parenting, ADHD, teen suicide and child/adolescent psychopathology.