@phdthesis{8656397,
  abstract     = {{Men shaping man offers a cultural history of the transformation of the art-historical theme of the male nude in fin-de-siècle Belgium (c. 1885-1914). A dual observation serves as the point of departure for this examination. On the one hand, a heightened anxiety concerning the definition and the implications of a masculine gender identity courses through the era, constituting an ostensibly cross-European ‘crisis’ of masculinity. On the other hand, the male nude at this time not only remained salonfähig but attained a heightened significance in the arts, in Belgium as in its neighboring countries. Might we resolve the apparent contradiction between men’s concerns about faltering notions of masculinity and the enthusiasm with which they embarked upon the representation of male nudity?--and can we do so by conceiving meaningfully of a centrality of the male body within the reassessment and re-definition of masculinity then underway? 
Three cases of specific artworks structure the dissertation. They do so chronologically as well as thematically, for each case corresponds to one broad set of issues - of health, sexuality and race, respectively - which made the male body a charged site of gendered discursivity. Combining close reading and thick description, present-day gender-historical insights are held up against contemporary source material. Focusing on Jef Lambeaux’s statuette The Wrestlers (c. 1896) and Charles Van der Stappen’s monument The Death of Ompdrailles (1883-92), I highlight the institution of a muscular regime which bridged the fine arts, biopolitics and the world of combat sports and physical culture. By examining Jean Delville’s canvas The School of Plato (1898), I indicate the shifting implications of men’s physical intimacy, as categories of sexuality congealed into a hetero/homosexual dichotomy. Concentrating on Arsène Matton’s colonial sculpture The Paddler (1911-12), I show that the symbolic subjugation of the black man’s body helped consolidate normative white masculinity as a constitutive component of a restyled Belgian colonialism.
Ultimately, Men shaping man aims to demonstrate a wide-ranging shift in notions of masculinity and male homosociality as (partly) shaped in and through representations of the male body. The argument is twofold: firstly, it maintains that the male nude lost a self-evidence which it had previously enjoyed as it became visible in the fin de siècle as a marker of an embodied masculinity, and, secondly, it affirms that, as such, the transformation of the male nude allows to trace the implication of the fine arts in the broad cultural project of the re-articulation of notions of masculinity.}},
  author       = {{Dekeukeleire, Thijs}},
  keywords     = {{Masculinities,Sexuality,The male nude,Belgian art,Nineteenth-century art}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{xvi, 396}},
  publisher    = {{Universiteit Gent. Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte}},
  school       = {{Ghent University}},
  title        = {{Men shaping man : the formative power of the male nude in fin-de-siècle Belgium}},
  year         = {{2020}},
}