American Masculinity

AMERICAN MASCULINITY is a series of film and photographic works by Markus Denil and Marval Rex, that captures contemporary transmasculine subjects embodying traditional American male archetypes. The series challenges preconceived notions of masculinity and expands our collective memory of what it means to be masculine today.

We are living in a moment of urgency, where nostalgia has become a tool of oppression—yearning for a masculinity that no longer exists and cannot exist in its exalted, oppressive, monolithic form. This nostalgia is embodied by men with exorcized breasts and covert vaginas: uncanny, queer men who walk among us. AMERICAN MASCULINITY is a strike against the stultifying invisibility that transgender men face, a naming of the shadow of masculinity we are shrouded in as we remain unseen in mainstream culture. It’s about making explicit our implicit existence. If we fell in the woods, would you hear it?

AMERICAN MASCULINITY  speaks to our late-capitalist state and is guided by the words of the late economist Mark Fisher. The interplay between time-past and time-future is present in the material itself: analog and digital are entangled and inseparable. As trans men, we live in ambiguity: our time is out of joint—are we present or absent, or both/and?
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Through this spectral phenomenology, we haunt traditional masculine codes. As trans men, we experience the daily psychic assault of rising fascism and right-wing extremism—driven by a nostalgic longing for the “good ol’ days” of racism, sexism, and authoritarianism. Each wave hits our being harder than that last. This work is our breakwater.

With generous support from the Puffin Foundation, we printed five still images from the video piece onto silk-organza flags.