boys keep swinging

[freckles_and_doubt]

This site (gay site, not madly safe for work) just pushed a whole lot of my academic buttons simultaneously, causing my brain to momentarily freeze as it was overwhelmed by all the appropriate jargonistic kutchababble. This is a bizarre intersection of fan art and slashy sensibility with Disney - Disney heroes re-imagined as underwear models.

The whole thing fascinates me because of its layering of transgression and inversion. As fan art it plays beautifully and artistically with animation's inherent tendency towards essentialism and idealisation, the buff male Body Beautiful in all its abstracted glory. It's also a rather fun exploitation of Disney characterisation - those "models" leap off the page at you, the classic model poses given considerable sophistication because you're aware of the character's construction from the films, which I have to say the artist invokes with a great deal of skill. They become the familiar personality with a new, highly sexualised dimension, which is one of the more obvious and immediate subversive responses to the Disney monolith's squeaky-clean image. Fan art of any sort is about filling in spaces, and sex in the Disney oeuvre is a particularly gaping absence.

But it's not just sexualisation of Disney, it's homoerotic sexualisation of Disney, taking it just one step further into transgressive inversion given the conservative values the studio projects. There are some rather fun critical responses to Disney which talk about homoerotic anxiety in the animation of male figures: in the early days of Disney the artists and animators were exclusively male, and you can see how a kind of locker-room mentality might easily develop around the representation of the idealised female form in animation. Idealising the male form becomes a lot more dodgy, particularly back in the early part of the twentieth century, and I suspect this kind of anxiety is one of the reasons why early Disney princes are a bit cardboard-cut-out. Conversely, they're also rife with suppressed homoerotic potential, which this artist joyously exploits.