Dressing Up in Power

Abstract

On one hand, the article examines ways in which Tom of Finland's drawings participated in discursive formations that created and disseminated the gay macho look. "Tom's men" appropriated these pictures to make gay identities visible in their bodies, and created potentially resisting meanings. On the other hand, the author explores the meanings of Tom's drawings, particularly in relation to discourses of sexuality, gender, and race. He argues for the multiplicity of power and for ambivalent interaction of resistance and oppression in Tom's drawings. Tom's pictures draw attention to an idea, derived from Michel Foucault, that power and resistance are to be found in one and the same place. Although ways in which these images are used may give rise to subversive meanings they also circulate racist, sexist, and fascist discourses that contradict their potentially radical meanings. Indeed, the problem with the transgressive pleasures is that transgression may help to sustain the limits that are supposed to be crossed and deconstructed by a transgressor.

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