GLR January-February 2026

to be seen from below. Before sling and stone, before gaze and glory, there is contact. Marble, unlike skin, cannot blush or get warm, so sculptors found ways of eroticizing it through tension and touchpoints. Classical feet are not simply there to keep heroes upright; they conduct the sculpture’s electricity into the viewer. They’re not just anatomical necessities; they’re compositional tools— deeply erotic ones. T HE G AY G AZE R OLAND B ARTHES , in Camera Lucida (1980), introduced the con cept of the punctum: that unexpected detail in an image that in

ing the idea of something always present yet hidden in plain sight, charged with desire precisely because it’s on the edge of exposure, between visibility and the impossibility of being seen—or the forced concealment, almost an imprisonment, of the shoe. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (in 1975’s Screen journal) famously defined the male gaze—the way women’s bodies are broken down into fragments, eroticized for the straight male viewer. Director Quentin Tarantino, noto rious for his foot obsession, perfectly exemplifies this: his shots fragment the female body, reducing it to fetishized parts. But queer desire plays by different rules. So, what happens when the gaze shifts? Enter the male gayze .

voluntarily arrests the gaze—the thing that hooks you. Feet function as one of the strongest punctum points in art, photography, and film. They blend sensory intimacy with visual power. Positioned at the bottom of the frame, subtly arched or flexed, guiding your gaze up the body, feet direct our eye. This is

In queer desire, fragmentation isn’t about passive objectification—it’s about fixation, about reverence. Instead of centering pene tration or dominant masculinity, the male gayze lingers on unexpected focal points: feet, hands, necks. It finds pleasure in the

In Western visual culture, feet have always played a central role in anchoring the male body in space.

body’s edges, in what is visible but not always noticed. It’s al most a devotional kink: an ethics of attention in which the act is to dwell, to tend, to aspire. The kiss on the heel, the unlacing, the tying back up: a charged and desecrating ritual, not residue. If nakedness is one kind of erotica, opacity is another. Too much light bleaches desire; too little kills it. The sweet spot is half seen, half-felt—the tension between underexposure and over exposure as the hottest foreplay. Fashion designer Tom Ford’s advertising campaigns are a

not incidental. It is visual seduction. Feet are puncta because they arrive as surplus, extras, and then eat the frame from within. If Barthes names the sting, Leo Bersani in The Freudian Body (1990) explains the charge: Sexuality loosens the self, and the fetish, this “partial object,” condenses intensity at the edges where control yields to relation. Put simply: Barthes gives the hook, Bersani, the voltage, defining the practice of attention that relocates intimacy to ankles, arches, heels. Bersani, read along side Freud’s theory of the fetish object, is consistent in explor

WHERE THE PULSE LIVES BY JOHN LOUGHERY

“ Where the Pulse Lives is an entertaining and moving memoir. Loughery gives us splendid glimpses of New York from the inside . . . and a rich portrait of that crucial group of activists, the gay men and lesbians of ACT UP.” —Charles Kaiser, Th e Washington Post “Loughery, a smart historian, gives a wonderful historical romp through a young man’s gay odyssey.” —Walter Holland

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January–February 2026

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