*This is a guest post by Petra Anders, Ph.D.*
Michael Akers’ drama Morgan (2012) deals with a young man named Morgan who used to be an enthusiastic cyclist. He had won a lot of medals and awards but after having had a severe accident Morgan sees himself confronted with paraplegia. His mother, his friend Lane and Dean, his new love(r), become important people on his way back to everyday life.
Nowadays, high heels are gendered footwear; they are culturally associated with women or femininity. But this is not for whom high-heeled shoes were made for in the past.
Historically, high-heeled shoes were men’s footwear, worn by men in horseback-riding cultures, where heels helped them stay in the stirrup (e.g. Persian shoes in 9th century, vaquero boots in 16th century or cowboy boots in 19th century). High-heeled shoes were important for their functionality and practicality, two of the most traditional masculine traits when it comes to footwear.
*white, straight, middle-class, able-bodied, youngish, cis-gender, Western
However banal it may sound, shit, dung, faeces, poop, excrement, number two, shite, bowel movement, stool, discharge, defecation or crap matters. Without the regular defecation, our bodies die. Discharging waste from our bodies is literally a life-saver.
How to defecate is a matter of acculturation and socialisation we are exposed to. Most Western people use a sitting flush toilet and toilet paper to remove the traces of defecation and pee in an environment that is familiar, cosy and clean. It is quite a different experience to take a dump at the chemical toilet – they are not supposed to be a place where you should or could feel at home, despite engaging in very homely activity. Chemical toilets have no homelike atmosphere; they are a transitional place for masses to relief themselves as quickly as possible. When you must shit in public places (e.g. public toilet in a mall, workplace or a chemical toilet), you must do it so quickly that nobody even notices it. Yes, we are that uncomfortable with our own faeces.
Positive representations are of great importance when mainstream media portrayals about sex work, gender transgression or pleasures are encoded as ‘bad’, not ‘normal’, Othered and hence ridiculed or sidelined in the film narrative.
However, this is not how the story goes in Magic Mike XXL (MM XXL). MM XXL (2015, d.: Gregory Jacobs) is build around male sex work (i.e. stripping), masculinity as a fluid concept and women as central guilt- and shame-free pleasure seekers with spending power.
