Queering boundaries: semen and visual representations from the Middle Ages and in the era of the AIDS crisis

In this essay I address some of the ways in which certain images, which share visual and verbal vocabularies of body fluids, visualize male-male sexual identities and body practices. Through the articulation of these terms, and most especially semen, body boundaries are at once delineated and transgressed. The differential relatedness of these images from the Middle Ages and the late 1980s and 1990s is underlined by the ways they subvert contemporary conventions of visual representation while always remaining accessible. It is this efficacy which allows me to link these representations, and which I attempt to articulate. To put this in other terms, I am interested in the ways in which boundaries of the body prove themselves fluid, as fluids of the body cross body-boundaries.