THE HEGEMONIC AESTHETIC

A psycho-historical exploration of gay men’s body image in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is a story of change. As demonstrated in academic narratives of idealised bodies in those periods, and demonstrated in the popular art of those times, the ‘perfect’ gay body of the 1960s to 1980s is strikingly different from the body many young gay men of the late 1990s and early 2000s find most attractive. Moreover, this shift has had implications across sexual orientations. While the gay ideal of the 1970s might be best described as a ‘straight body’ the ideal straight body of today may actually coincide with the new gay ideal. Stemming from Connell’s (1995) application of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, and a sensibility toward the queerness inherent to discussions of bodies and sex, this article will examine the concept of body image and its historical shift across time and sexual orientations. Ultimately, we hope to demonstrate that a body type can become hegemonic in a given historical moment, as witnessed by that body type’s prevalence in both actual persons and in art. We call this hegemony of body image the ‘hegemonic aesthetic’ of the period.