NOT HE, NOT SHE: JUST KIDS

I take, as a starting point, gender oscillation in the book Just Kids by Patti Smith, whose narrative memoirs makes the definition of boy and girl interchangeable, as seen in feminine and masculine images of Patti and by Robert Mapplethorpe during the emergence of unisex fashion and behavioral changes of the seventies. This is a starting point for understanding how the deconstruction of the male, what is of interest here, can cut into the dominant narrative (what Kaja Silverman calls "dominant fiction") in order not to create a counter-ideological narrative, rather to create what I term a "counternarrative". This entails a reaction of hypersensitivity that contaminates the hegemonic discourse and lets the male body present itself as vulnerable, dejected, at risk, even from the center from which its symbolic power emanates, as seen in the choice of masochistic images in some of the portraits of male bodies photographed by Mapplethorpe and in Andre Masseno's radical solo performance, OUTDOOR BODY MACHINE, examined in this work.