From Susan Fischer on Facebook today, a link to a very old (11/30/11) Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon depicting the Trojan Pizza Boy:
(#1) Pizza Boy wears a cap, and he comes bearing two pizza cartons (plus, we assume, a lot of concealed Trojan warriors)
Well, there’s a Pizza Boy archetype, and it comes in a gay version as well as a Trojan version:
(#2) The pizza boy archetype, as depicted by young Melbourne artist Allain de Leon in DNA Magazine, April 2013; still the cap, still the two cartons of pizza
#2 is from my 10/12/17 posting “The pizza boy as cultural figure”, where I said:
The figure is a package of symbolic content and associations, among them: the desirable youth; the delivery figure, someone who comes to your door bearing pleasurable goods for money; pizza as an American cultural emblem of warm informal social associations; and a cluster of associations of food with sex, some more general, others specific to pizza slices and whole pizza pies
And that discussion is once again relevant in my life, thanks to recent e-mail from Steven Dashiell, who pursues research on discourse in male-dominated subcultures (looking at military men, gamers, barbershop patrons, gay men, and more) and has built on my posting on the trope of the pizza boy in gay pornography in a recent essay of his own:
Steven Dashiell, “I have something for you”: The Erotic Habitus and Class Situatedness of the Pizza Boy Trope in Gay Pornography, The Projector, winter 2024
On the journal, from its site:
The Projector: A Journal of Film, Media, and Culture an electronic peer reviewed journal, published bi-annually by the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The journal welcomes articles, interviews, reviews, and screenplays from emerging and established scholars and practitioners.
I will have a lot more to say about SD in forthcoming postings. Here, from his first e-mail to me a little while back:
Last year I submitted a manuscript to a contest for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies … and was honored when it won an honorable mention.
… I wanted to … thank you for your blog, as your comments and observations were important to my research. Because of the honorable mention win, the piece was published … in the online journal The Projector.
And the first two paragraphs of this piece, which serve as a longish abstract for it:
In modern pornography, the delivery boy (or, more specifically, the pizza boy) is a common trope. Almost always cast as a hapless cisgender male, the pizza boy represents someone both expected and unexpected — bringing something that has ostensibly been ordered but possessing both a bearing and a willingness for sex that the audience is supposed to recognize as the catalyst for the sexual act. The pizza boy speaks to the convenience of the plot, a mystery guest who is not a regular partner and is thus able to break the monotony that is linked with intact couples’ sex in pornography. In addition, the pizza boy allows the customer to breach the taboo of anonymous sex without venturing out for it. Overall, the delivery boy might exist as one of the most cliched and expected plots in a pop culture understanding of pornography and is therefore easily recognized. This is true in both heterosexual and homosexual porn. However, the role of the pizza boy represents a specific social space in terms of class and gender, which situates any erotics that are associated with the use of the imagery.
This article examines that class–gender intersection in the portrayal of the pizza boy in gay porn. I use the concept of erotic habitus to analyze ways the pizza boy is expected to behave and be configured in a sexual scene (Green 2008). To investigate this, I examine four separate scenes centering on the pizza boy and use critical discourse analysis to consider how the character trope demonstrates an erotic habitus in four distinct ways: embodiment, transgression, negotiation, and submission. The role of the pizza boy as a working-class man who places himself in unknown situations creates the need for a “tough” masculinity that must still be submissive to the customer who is his economic superior and employer for the presumed delivery act. To investigate the presence of erotic habitus, I use a critical thematic analysis of actions and behaviors that are present in multiple depictions of the pizza boy. To consider discourses and visual presentations in the videos, I use thematic analysis to articulate the emergence and analysis of erotic practices (Braun and Clarke 2013). This article’s methodology is inherently critical because it interrogates both the disarming superficiality of the pornographic scenes and the positioning of gender and class tropes in the portrayal of gayness. In short, this article identifies how the pizza boy in gay porn represents a power relationship that highlights masculine-centric beliefs about power and authority because differences in class status shape the scenarios.
In postings to come, I won’t pursue the concept of habitus further (from Wikipedia: In sociology, habitus [used by Pierre Bourdieu as the cornerstone of his sociology] is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal habits, skills, and disposition of character), but will instead consider the course of SD’s life history and the way he has arranged his personal and professional lives — just the sorts of things that SD himself investigates in studying the lives of men.
May 7, 2024 at 5:46 am |
One of the very first gay porn films I ever saw (actually, I haven’t seen that many) was titled “Pizza Boy: He Delivers”.
May 7, 2024 at 5:54 am |
A signal moment in the genre, specifically discussed in my piece and in Steven Dashiell’s.