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July 2025
Redlist Magazine
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The male body has often been confiscated for war through forced recruitment. In this process, the subject is stripped of his identity and turned into a tool within a violent machine, just like another expendable resource.
This photographic series explores that very process: how the soldier’s body, almost always young, almost always manipulated, ceases to be a subject and is reduced to an object.
One form of resistance is to remember that the place where these bodies must grow is not on any front, but in places like the coast of Cornwall, where Tuke imagined utopias, or in the works of other artists who turned the representation of the body into a form of liberation from the norms of their time.
These images do not shy away from the erotic charge of the military. On the contrary, by reappropriating the eroticism traditionally present in representations of the naked body in recruitment settings, they subvert military mandates to propose a pacifist vocation. This redirection points not toward power, but toward a possible utopia like the one Henry Scott Tuke imagined before his models were sent to the front
These images inhabit a tension between discipline and desire, between conscription and Arcadia, aiming to reject the values that glorify the confiscation of the male body and that underpin homophobia. To oppose virile militarism is also to resist its homophobic offshoots.
Tex and Images. Gerardo Vizmanos