Please view the posters presented at the 18th Annual CityTech Faculty and Student Research Poster Session below. You can click on each poster to enlarge it and view the PDF version under the poster abstract.
We thank all presenters for sharing their innovative and informative research with the CityTech community and beyond!
31. Sailors: The iconography of an all-American homoerotic symbol
Through a new critical reading and analysis of images found in the magazines Young Physique and Physique Pictorial, I examine how the sailor has become a homoerotic icon. Looking at these magazines in the post-World War II and pre-Stonewall period, I’m specifically interested in how sailors in the popular imagination are viewed as the epitome of all things American and yet simultaneously occupy a distinctly queer space of desire. Sailors are a gay icon in the mythology of American culture and an object of gay fetishization and fantasy. For queer men, who were seen as outside of mainstream culture or “on the fringe,” what does it mean for their object of desire to be such a patriotic symbol of masculinity? What are the implications or race and class inherent in these depictions of sailors in the medium of physique magazines? View or download a PDF version of this poster.
