Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 社會學系 === 89 === This research attempts to analyze body politics of gender as revealed by erotic albums. From Phenomenal Sociology point of view, media reality is inseparable from the subjective reality of the audience. Methodology employed in this research includes news clips and interviews with erotic album readers as complementary information resources to find out how photo images define, sexualize and gender-differentiate the body at both physical and gender levels. In addition, information is gathered from interviews to probe into gender identity and realization that album readers discover in intercourse of self with images in the album.
Research findings show that erotic albums, by means of the image, not only carry out people’s sexual imagination of male and female bodies, but also reflect the difference of disciplined power in body display that both sexes undergo. Female body in albums is subject to far more discipline than the male one.
As far as readers are concerned, on one hand, male readers launch themselves into exuberant masculinity in the process of reading and fantasizing female bodies in the album. On the other hand, they become penis-centered and eyes-monopolized hollow men, who indulge body in fantasizing the disciplined and mirrored female body while incapable of confronting own sex constitution and thus self-alienation. In the contrary, although facing worldwide trend for body perfection, including female body conveyed in erotic albums, female readers seem more agile in combining body experience with self and others as the base framework to read female body in albums, and thereby resist the social overwhelm of body perfection.
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