Berlin, 16–17 June 2011
First workshop of the DFG research project Media Amateurs in Gay Culture. The Photographic Self-representation of Men in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Some of the issues addressed by the 1968 generation are currently being reconsidered in terms of their influence upon education, feminism and political cultures. The role of the gay movement and its impact on the transformation of images of masculinity and modes of public presentation have so far been explored only in a marginal manner.
In what forms, aesthetic structures and social practices did the private become public? How did it move ‘out of the closet’ – from a subculture into the visibility of mainstream culture? The consequences of this development and the stimuli it provided for artistic, pop cultural and scholarly discourses are important historico-cultural events that need to be examined in relation to current self-representations.
Self-observations, self-thematizations, self-analyses and self-disclosures by gay men (and media amateurs) are presented here in the context of aesthetics and art history, education, psychoanalysis, sexology and cultural anthropology, and are discussed under consideration of significant and dominant records of gay identities. To what extent can publicity and visibility be contextualized in this regard as topoi that lead to political power and raise questions of normalization and inclusion?
As the cultural history of the self is always closely connected to the media history of the self, we investigate components and structures that contribute to the visibility and thus existence of a self-design through media channels. Starting out from diverse forms of self-disclosure in contemporary internet-based media, we aim to draw attention to a period in which amateur approaches and artistic articulations produced gender images that redefine the boundaries of the private and the public.
