Stud: Architectures of Masculinity.

What makes Stud stand out from the countless recent interdisciplinary volumes that take it upon themselves to de-essentialize gender in 12 essays or less? It's not the snappy title that states the collection's overall aim - to reveal "architecture and masculinity to be mutually reinforcing ideologies, each invoking the other to naturalize and to uphold its particular claims and intentions" - in a single word. It's not the would-be romance-novel cover, though the studly architect coming out of his shirt has a certain point-of-purchase appeal. Nor do the book's variously compelling insights into the ways in which architecture participates in the performative constitution of masculinity carry it; six years after the publication of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, the belated entry of her ideas into architectural discourse is predictable, and the results really a bit formulaic.

Ultimately, it's the disparate range of material that gets stuffed into Stud - from Lee Edelman's delightfully paranoid ruminations on the psychodynamics of the public urinal to George Stoll's presentation of Tupperware as Minimalist sculpture to an inspired reprint of a 1956 Playboy spread showing the ideal bachelor pad ("primavera"colored panels and all) - that makes it a worthy if weird read. Joel Sanders' introductory essay attempts, somewhat in vain, to work this sprawling archive into a coherent body; more compelling are the frictions generated among its overdeveloped and underdeveloped parts. Consider, say, the tension between queer history and queer theory that develops when George Chauncey's survey of gay men's pre-Stonewall appropriation of New York public space brushes up against Edelman's (psyche)analysis of the generic men's room: Chauncey notes that public washrooms provided a space for men to engage in casual sex in relative isolation from the rest of their lives and identities; Edelman understands the scopic and spatial dynamics of the urinal as constitutive of heterosexual male identity and its anxious undoing. ("In the men's room, looking sucks.") Then consider what happens to Edelman's essay when it is followed by three contemporary public-bathroom projects that alter the spatial coordinates that enable his analysis. Suddenly, Stud reads like a catalogue for an exhibition that never happened, only the theoretical essays don't interpret the work so much as they are silently challenged by it.

Reading across Stud in this way is the best way to appreciate its significance for the study of architecture. As queer theorists turn their attention to piano bars, gymnasiums, heavy-metal concert-halls, and the interior of Freud's office, they simultaneously expand architecture's subject matter and test the limits of their own ruling ideologies. ("Outside the gym, masculinity may be in crisis," Marcia Ian writes. "Inside the musclehead gym, however, ... it is definitely in stasis, although to maintain this stasis requires herculean efforts.") "Art" projects like Robert Gober's Genital Wallpaper, which doubles as the book's endpapers, and Vito Acconci's Adjustable Wall Brav demand to be considered as architecture by the sheer fact of their inclusion.

My sense, however, is that Stud presents the greatest challenges to the material that is traditionally recognizable as "architecture." Never before has a Rem Koolhaas villa been discussed in terms of the prosthetic devices that permit its wheelchair-bound male occupant the "visual and physical freedom ... necessary for the successful performance of masculinity," and I imagine not too many monographic studies of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill care to consider how the relentlessly Cartesian design of the U.S. Air Force Academy cadet quarters in Denver participates in "the production of masculine subjects, irrespective of the soldier's biological sex." Such pronouncements are as refreshing as they are absurd - somebody had to say them, no matter how self-evident they seem. If Stud occasionally comes across as an awkward first encounter between queer performance theory and architectural history, it nevertheless suggests an open field of cross-disciplinary research that will hopefully develop a more nuanced language to span the disciplinary divides created by its own archive. In short, Stud is more successful as genrefuck than as genderfuck.

Ernest Pascucci is senior editor of ANY magazine.