163 Krystian Grądz Uniwersytet Szczeciński http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5890-7866 Queering the (Camera) Matrix: Male Body Aesthetics in Erwin Olaf’s and Ruven Afanador’s Photography Abstract: In the following paper, the author approaches some of the visual work of two contemporary photographers – Erwin Olaf and Ruven Afanador – in an attempt to see how their work renounces traditional views on masculinity. Te photographs chosen for this analysis appear to be a peculiar play with social conventions and expectations related to gender and sexuality. In their work, both Erwin Olaf and Ruven Afanador seem to disrupt and reject the economy of heterosexual desire in favour of a much freer – and unconstrained by propriety – expression of corporeality and sensuality. As a result of such a spectacle of re-creation, the body is redefned not only as a means of expressing performativity (or, the surface onto which it is inscribed), but above all as a medium of becoming which functions as a reservoir of ever-changing meanings. Keywords: photography, Erwin Olaf, Ruven Afanador, male body aesthetics, queer, masculinity Te human body seems troublesome: people tend to perceive it not exactly for what it is, and what it does (can we even see the body as it materialises, without judgment on what it should look like according to some arbitrary suppositions informed by our own desires and/or social propriety?); they cannot see the body, for what they see is an embodiment of their own ideologies inscribed onto it, in opposition to which the presence of any body is judged. We know that one’s relationship with one’s own body is problematic and based on multiple illusions, which starts with the mirror stage and is only reinforced later in life through id-ego-superego triad of conficts. Te afective and ideological load always makes the body detached from itself – it transforms the body into a nexus of acquired meanings. Tus, the body becomes a platform of cultural (re)nego- tiations of meaning which is either contained within the disciplinary regime, 1 1. By the disciplinary regime it is meant the kind of control which societies and their social structures infict upon individuals to mould a certain type of human who conforms to their arbitrarily imposed expectations. Te hypothesis best expounded by Michael Foucault in Disci- pline and Punish: Te Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Er(r)go. Teoria–Literatura–Kultura Er(r)go. Teory–Literature–Culture Nr / No. 41 (2/2020) fotografe/obrazy/projekcje photographs/images/projections issn 2544-3186 https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.8302