Otherness and Identity: The Aesthetics of Men Faced with Toxic Masculinity

The dynamism between otherness and differences with identity and equivalence provides key ideas for analyzing the process of gender individuation by artistic works. In this article I discuss the problem of artistic and aesthetic reactions to homogeneous cultural patterns of masculinity, which is characterized by the concept of "toxic masculinity" in pop-cultural, sociological, psychological and gender studies discourses. One common theme is that "toxic masculinity" encompasses harmful standards that generate antagonisms and diminish multi-figure masculinity to a singular "socially acceptable" level at the expense of children, women and men - and thus society as a whole. The artist's task is to reveal this noxiousness, and to highlight the value of the coexistence of a variety of forms of masculinity in terms of its diversity, thereby helping to mitigate the consequences of disruptive gender relations.