ABSTRACT
Lehman pointed to various narrative and generic contexts for recent cinematic exposures of the male body, such as heightened and hyperbolic representations of the "melodramatic penis" and the "dead penis" (1998; this volume). While he grants that recent Hollywood cinema has shown a greater willingness to toy with explicit male sexual representation, he finds that dominant narrative cinema still tends to position and unveil the nude male body in ways that reinforce the patriarchal assumption that "penises cannot simply be shown as penises in ordinary contexts," since to do so would "threaten the awe and mystique resulting from keeping [the penis] hidden and fall outside the various cultural discourses such as pornography, art, medicine, and humor that attempt to give it special significance" (1998, 7).
