@article{article_529664, title={Vulnerable White Men and Sexual Citizenship: Charles Ray Sculptures}, journal={Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture}, pages={71–93}, year={2017}, author={Thomas, Jerry D. and Thomas, Jerry D.}, keywords={Sexual citizenship,queer theory,Charles Ray,public art,male nude sculpture,Huckleberry Finn}, abstract={<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:2.0cm;text-align:justify;line-height: 15.0pt;mso-line-height-rule:exactly"> <span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:9.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin;mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin">This essay examines tensions in white men’s public sexualities. Norms of sexual citizenship in the United States hide from public view vulnerable white men—naked and queer—especially in public art. In summer 2015, the Art Institute of Chicago showcased a major exhibit—Charles Ray Sculptures 1997–2014—that disrupted extant civil and legal models of citizenship that view white men as sexually unobjectified and impenetrable. The exhibit foreshadows queer nature—constructed and embodied—as a sexual citizenship model emphasizing diverse masculinities that crosscut ages, races, genders, and sexualities. Ray’s work represents vulnerable naked and queer men as an integral part of American life from childhood to adulthood, including men in the classic American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ray presents vulnerable, embodied white men as both omnipresent and invisible. To disembody—disarticulate, erase, deny, shame into closets—the bodies of naked and queer men is to strip men of sexual citizenship. The disembodied sexual man compartmentalizes and severs his whole, despite representations that he is impenetrable, not vulnerable. Ray’s exhibit—a queer nature, an indoor park—constructs part of what is missing in sexual citizenship. <o:p> </o:p> </span> </p>}, number={7}, publisher={Murat GÖÇ}