Conditions of Restriction and Resistance: The body in post-war American physique magazines

This was the title of Will’s MA thesis that he wrote in 2024. His investigation into physique magazines and photography is ongoing, and you can find out more about his intended research on the “writing” section of this website.

Abstract

Conditions of Restriction and Resistance investigates the role of the body in photographs from American physique magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that such photographs were instrumental in forming and shaping gay aesthetics, consciousness, and culture centred on muscle, masculinity, and sex. Taking a materialist and historical lens, the research examines how male bodies inside magazines operated under the dialectical conditions of restriction–imposed by censorship and obscenity laws–and resistance–as acts of subversion against heteronormative structures. 

The dissertation claims that the body acts as a “site of mediation” through which the opposing forces of restriction and resistance were negotiated, which came to influence both visual language and the social function of physique magazines. The work is composed of four key chapters: the mediation of the body in the physique magazine photographs, the body and its function as a material extension of text, the depiction and representation of ‘bodies together’, and the role of reification and commodification of the body for the development of gay identity. Drawing on theoretical insights from scholars and thinkers such as Harun Farocki, David Harvey, and Kevin Floyd, the work argues that physique magazines were a crucial component of the growing gay cultural network developing alongside the Homophile movement in America. 

By re-examining the material and ideological impact of physique photography, this research contributes to a broader understanding of how visual cultures were a crucial component in forming and shaping homosexual consciousness in mid-century America. It rigorously makes the claim that, even during times of strict restriction, photographs of muscle men in physique magazines played an active role in expanding the visibility, desirability, and social cohesion of male homosexual identity.