Homosocial Spaces Research Articles

‘We’re respectful boys … we’re not misogynistic!’: analysing defensive, contradictory and changing performances of masculinity within young men’s in-person and digitally mediated homosocial spaces

ABSTRACT This paper critically examines and theorizes how digital technologies and forms of communication, such as men-only private chat groups, facilitate and mediate the forms of masculinity young heterosexual men in the UK co-construct, perform and negotiate in their homosocial interactions. Qualitative data is drawn from 8 focus groups and 17 one-to-one interviews with young men aged 18–25 years, who identify as cisgender and heterosexual (N = 40), which is analysed using critical masculinity theories, including the concept of homosociality. Key findings indicate that the characteristics of online communication, including 24/7 connectivity and the ability to rapidly share online content, such as texts in men-only private chat groups, via the infrastructure of digital platforms, technologies and devices, facilitate ‘digitally mediated homosociality’, which changes in response to gendered hierarchies, relational norms and interactional needs. While participants often use online communications to engage in non-hierarchical homosociality via practices that enhance camaraderie, solidarity and emotional intimacy with other men, they also use them for hierarchical homosociality to acquire masculine status via practices that include non-consensually sexting teenage girls and women’s ‘nudes’, though they defensively distanced themselves from misogyny. We conclude by outlining how these findings can inform educational interventions that tackle misogyny and promote non-hierarchical masculinities.

Nos Vemos en la Cancha : Latinx Women Athletes Making Place in Los Angeles

Abstract: This essay considers how queer Latinx recreational sporting communities construct homosocial environments through their occupation of public spaces in Los Angeles. Field observations and ethnographic analysis identify how soccer communities provide Latinx women access to homosocial spaces through the social networks they create on and off the fields. The relationships and interactions of the participants in women's leagues serve as case studies of the radical homo-intimate formations within the Latinx community. The amalgamation of homonormative and heteronormative identities within women's teams alludes to the tacit treatment of sexuality within leisure sporting community spaces. The narratives of league women grant an auxiliary conceptualization of Latinx identity formation and negotiations of belonging outside the frameworks of the traditional Latino community and the hegemonic gender and sexual body politics of the US state.

'To get freedom, one went abroad a lot': British Homosexual Men and Continental Europe as a Site of Emancipation, 1950-75.

This article traces the leisure travel of British homosexual men in continental Europe between 1950 and 1975. The aim of this article is to challenge narratives of British post-war sexual rights discourses as isolated from continental Europe. Taking a transnational approach, which examines the ways in which Britain was embedded in processes of social and cultural change across Europe, it charts informal encounters and networks of cultural communication forged by homosexual men themselves during the post-war tourist boom. Using Oral Histories deposited at the British Library Sound Archive, I emphasize the role of homosocial spaces in the production and performance of the sexual self and establish how affluence provided access to spaces for sexual self-development during a period when homosexuality remained criminalized in Britain. It explores two distinct types of holidays taken by homosexual travellers, examined via a life writing approach-the Amsterdam city break and the southern European beach holiday-and shows how these experiences shaped their self-conception and hopes for a more tolerant society at home. In revealing how foreign forms of homosexual sociability influenced domestic politics, I argue for a stronger emphasis on British entanglements with continental Europe when tracing political and social transformations during the post-war period.

Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights by Cynthia Orozco

Reviewed by: Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights by Cynthia Orozco Katherine Bynum Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights. By Cynthia Orozco. (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2022. Pp. 537. Notes, selected bibliography.) Scholarship on the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) has generally focused on the organization’s assault on school desegregation cases and the landmark Hernandez v. Texas Supreme Court decision in 1954. Chicana/o historians have either ignored or denigrated the work of Alonso S. Perales, who was not only the founder of LULAC, but also a lawyer, public intellectual, Pan-American ideologue, and a United States diplomat. Cynthia Orozco’s biography of Perales argues that the Mexican American civil rights activist was one of the most important figures [End Page 409] in Texas throughout the twentieth century. By embracing “Mexican Americanism” as early as the 1920s—well before Mexicanas/os began using the term—“the Mexican-American male middle class of the 1920s of which Perales was a major leader” was “the first truly bilingual, bicultural sector . . . which consciously asserted citizenship and membership in the United States” (xxxi). The book builds on the author’s previous publication No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed (University of Texas Press, 2009), in which she argues that LULAC was more diverse than the assimilationist, conservative, and anti-immigrant tropes long associated with it. Being born in 1898 to poor Mexican immigrants in South Texas—an area rife with anti-Mexican racism—did not prevent Perales from ascending the socioeconomic ladder throughout his life. He worked hard, entered the middle class through his education and profession as a lawyer, and always kept Mexican Americans, regardless of class, at the forefront of his civil rights organizing. Orozco credits Perales with keeping LULAC alive throughout the Great Depression and managing to help working-class Mexican Americans benefit from defense industry jobs with the Fair Employment Practices Committee. He also later prevented braceros from Mexico from working in small towns in South Texas because of widespread racism. Perales built relationships with other Mexican American political leaders, notably Henry B. González and Albert Peña from San Antonio and United States Senator Dennis Chávez from New Mexico. Orozco argues that Perales embraced candidates who worked to uplift La Raza (the people). She also details the numerous political positions in which he served at city, state, national, and international levels. Although the book is well researched, Orozco is overly apologetic for many of Perales’s shortcomings. He was a proud supporter of ultraconservative politicians like Representative Martin Dies (founder of the House Un-American Activities Committee) and Governor Allan Shivers, both of whom disguised their bigotry against Black and Mexican residents in the name of anti-communism. Perales was an ardent anti-Communist and only supported the San Antonio Pecan Shellers Strike in 1937 once its Communist leadership stepped away from the movement. Racism prevented him from supporting unionization or working in solidarity with Black activists. Furthermore, Orozco ignores the fact that Perales was a light-skinned Mexican American, and although he may have embraced La Raza, he ascended into the middle-class because of his privileged connection to whiteness, not just because of his ability to work hard for an education. Orozco criticizes Perales for his emphasis on homosocial spaces that separated Mexican women into LULAC auxiliary chapters, but the author had previously detailed this thoroughly in No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed. Her chapter on his time as a United States diplomat to several Latin American countries is where she is most critical in this volume. [End Page 410] Orozco reveals that he often followed orders and never spoke out in favor of democratic movements in Latin America, more than likely because they involved leftist politics. Altogether, the biography reveals that Alonso Perales dedicated his life to a limited civil rights cause, often at the expense of others. Katherine Bynum Arizona State University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Revisiting Homosociality and Homosocial Spaces in Pre-Modern Ottoman Society

This paper examines diverse conceptions of homosociality in pre-modern and modern societies, and discusses how these conceptions are politically, socially, culturally and spatially constructed and transformed throughout history, particularly during the modernization processes of the mid-19thcentury. Concentrating on two significant homosocial spaces, men’s coffeehouse and women’s section of the Ottoman-Turkish baths, it aims to demonstrate how homosociality is spatialized through the dissolution of the public/private dichotomy, as well as constructions of functionality in pre-modern Ottoman society. The paper follows a historical interpretative research methodology. Based on data derived from the second-hand sources available in the literature, the privatized public, complex, homoerotic and multi-functional characteristics of these homosocial spaces and their extensions towards and reflections on the Ottoman urban neighborhoods are critically analyzed and interpreted. The dissolution of the public/private dichotomy in these spaces also exemplifies the Foucaultian concept of heterotopia. The paper concludes that these traditional spaces and their modern versions demonstrate the constructedness of both gender categories and patriarchal structures.

Doing Knowledge through Knowing Women

Doing Knowledge through Knowing Women

Review: She’s at the Controls: Sound Engineering, Production and Gender Ventriloquism in the 21st Century, by Helen Reddington

Review: <i>She’s at the Controls: Sound Engineering, Production and Gender Ventriloquism in the 21st Century</i>, by Helen Reddington

Diplomacy in the Woods: Nature, Hunting, Masculinity, and Soviet Diplomacy under N.S. Khrushchev

Abstract Analyzing several documentary films and other sources through the lens of gender and feminist theory, this article explores the role of hunting and nature in Soviet diplomatic relationships. The article views diplomacy as a masculine space in which diplomatic negotiations relied on successful displays of toughness and the exhibition of prowess and agility. These skills were best demonstrated not in the official corridors of power but in settings imbued with symbolic meanings associated with masculinity, such as nature. The latter often served as a homosocial space where power was displayed and reconstituted through ritualistic performances of heroic masculinity. Such rituals as hunting sought to accomplish several goals. They promoted the male bonding that formed the basis of a preferred personal style of diplomacy and allowed Soviet apparatchiks to display marksmanship skills and a level of physical prowess that would present them to their foreign counterparts as potent leaders and desired allies. More importantly, as with other performative rituals of masculinity, Soviet diplomatic hunts produced and reproduced masculinity – and with it, power – and served strategically to assert or challenge international hierarchies, shape new and reaffirm faltering alliances, and demonstrate the agility and potency of the Soviet system to visiting state leaders.

Navigating and resisting the compulsory military service in Iran: embodied experiences of non-heterosexual Iranian men

Abstract In the homosocial space of the all male military service, (hetero)masculinity and gender normativity are promoted and bravery and warrior mentality are highly valued. On this basis, policing gender and sexuality is a relevant issue, aiming to reward heteronormativity and hyper masculinity and marginalize non heterosexuality and gender nonconforming performances. In the Iranian context, since the Iran Iraq war (1980–1988), military service has produced a feature of militarized (hetero)masculinities through the cult of martyrdom. It enforces soldiers to stand up against the enemy, be willing to seek martyrdom and sacrifice themselves in order to protect the Islamic Iranian homeland. It is a symbol of entering adulthood and during that time young men are expected to embody the official ideology which revolves around heteronormativity and strict gender norms. In this context, the focus of this paper is the embodied experiences of those young conscripts who do not embody the (hetero)masculine ideal, because they are either non heterosexual or do not fit into the strict regime of gender. Drawing on ethnographic data, and policy documents, this paper shows how the idea of the (hetero)masculine ideal has been translated into practice through the dispositif of the sarbazi and how some young Iranian non heterosexual men try to resist conscription while others try to find ways to carve out a liminal heterotopic space during their military service.

A Sytemetic Review of the 'Bromantic' Journey of Bollywood from Sholay to Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety

This paper will try to explore Bollywood’s reception and treatment of homosocial relationship. Exploiting the concept of ‘Bromance’ which has a close association with male homosociality, and projecting an asexual but emotional bonding, some Bollywood productions venture on showing a strong tie of friendship between boys. Unfortunately, the stories generally show that the entry or subsequent mediation of any woman tell upon that bonding and the ‘boys’ try hard to resist that entry into their homosocial space. This construction of an ‘all male world’ is problematised when these productions are analysed through the lens of the Bollywood ideology that promotes a normative cultural discourse to the pan-Indian audience and dares not to embrace any deviating or alternative cultural standpoint. The bottom line is the establishment of the supremacy of heteronormativity. This paper will discuss this in the light of Sholay (1975) and Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety (2018).

Performing androgyny: cross-dressing actresses, fandom, and queer sensibility in Hong Kong Cantonese opera

ABSTRACT While cross-dressing performance in Chinese opera has been extensively studied in various disciplines, the existing scholarship has a stronger emphasis on male actors playing female roles in Peking opera. This ethnography sheds light on women’s cross-dressing in Cantonese opera (yueju) in contemporary Hong Kong. Women playing the leading male role (the wenwusheng) is a century-old performance practice. Female wenwusheng being pursued by female fans is a noteworthy and yet understudied phenomenon. Based on my 2012–2016 ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses on the performative aspect of female wenwusheng’s androgynous embodiments onstage and off. I examine fandom within this mostly homosocial space by studying the interplay between female wenwusheng’s public, onstage performances and their informal, offstage engagement with fans. I suggest that, by manipulating the gender ambiguity and ambivalence that extends from their onstage to offstage personas, female wenwusheng provoke homoerotic emotional intimacy that ties them and their fans together. Neither passing as men onstage nor appropriating male actors’ masculinity is the female wenwusheng’s goal. Their performance and offstage mingling provide an affective emerging space that accommodates the fluidities of gendered identities and sexualities. Female wenwusheng’s embodied androgyny also enriches Cantonese opera, as a seemingly heterosexist traditional art form, with queer sensibility.

The game/s that men play: Male bonding in the Swedish business elite 1890–1960

During the first half of the twentieth century, the industrial success of Sweden opened up for an exclusive lifestyle among the business elite. Drawing on how a hunting club constructed and reproduced male fantasies, the article deals with male bonding in relation to generation change. By examining the sources such as correspondence and notes from a hunting society dominated by businessmen, the article highlights male performance of gender in a historical context. The article argues that male bonding can result in inequalities among different generations of men, since tension might occur if the homosocial space is based on hierarchies.

Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

Reviewed by: Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada Katherine Dugan Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 296 pp. $32.00. When Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada stepped into the basement of the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she stepped into a world where Catholic masculinity is constructed and sustained. As she argues in Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this world is "how religious men come to understand themselves and be recognized as men" (2). This Catholic manhood entails tattoos that articulate religious commitments and the work of the annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Dance of the Giglio. Framing her intervention, Maldonado-Estrada points out that the nuances of Catholic men's lives are understudied: "[i]t is odd to say it, but laymen are largely invisible in histories of Catholic devotional life. Or they are foils, by contrast heightening the piety of women" (10). This book enters a long conversation about Catholic devotionalism, which has historically centered women's experiences. Turning to men's devotional lives, this book charts the nature of man-making devotional labor. The structure of this book moves swiftly through arguments about the locations of religious practice, the role of labor in prayer, the place of money in festivals, questions about public performance of masculinities, and analysis of gentrification and the shifting nature of [End Page 81] urban religion. Among the many contributions this text makes to Catholic studies, three are especially poignant. First, in this book, devotionalism takes place in a relatively unexplored set of registers: bodies, joking, work, men's relationships and male homosocial spaces. Maldonado-Estrada posits that the men's tattoos are "devotional objects" that mediate relationship between themselves and the divine (48). Likewise, the aesthetics of this devotionalism are such that the men embody a "devotion that allows men to transgress, to play with vibrant aesthetics . . . and white heteronormativity" (54). This expands where scholars locate devotionalism: from women's spaces to men's; from inside churches to outside; and from subdued to vibrant aesthetics. Second, Maldonado-Estrada's attention to nuances of her ethnographic method is a model. While she notes that a woman in men's spaces should not have to talk or think so much about her gendered positionality (17), the way she does unfold the layers of her own positionality offers a thoughtful contribution to questions about method. She refuses to shy away from the way her female body, her Puerto Rican identity, her ability to paint, and her willingness to joke with the men in these pages built her method. During her years of fieldwork, Maldonado-Estrada spent countless hours building ethnographic relationships with the men who constitute the "lifeblood" (210) of this festival. This is how she "made real friendships that exceed the language of methodology" and "became a woman researcher who belonged in the masculine spaces of the feast" (104). The craft and style of her self-reflective negotiations enrich the work. Third, Lifeblood of the Parish is also a portrait of the shifting landscape of urban Catholicism in the early twenty-first century. This is about gentrification, changing parish demographics, and an urban Catholicism that is tied to Italian practices. When Maldonado-Estrada turns her descriptive eye to what she calls "public masculinity" (143) on display in the feast, she argues that the "muscle" of the Dance of the Giglio facilitates a normative heterosexuality through homosocial spaces (163). That space asserts a particular interpretation of Italian American identity onto the streets of Williamsburg—even among the changing demographics of the neighborhood (209). The focus on laymen's lives addresses a significant lacuna in Catholic studies. Maldonado-Estrada's decision to focus on masculinities is an important intervention: we all know women are around the edges of these men's devotional lives, but that is where they remain for the men in this book. This is a book and a story about men's lives, marked as men—the accompanying women fall outside the frame...

Black Women beyond Scandal

Published in 1814 in Haiti, Baron de Vastey's essay Le Système colonial dévoilé (The Colonial System Unveiled) provides a detailed account of colonialism's violence and anti-Blackness. As he "unveils" the atrocities of slavery, Vastey demonstrates how subjugation and racialization are the result of not only spectacular violence and killings but also laws and policies that work to produce race itself through more quotidian forms of violence. The author consistently returns to the experience of enslaved Black women and to the role and subject position white women occupied in enslaving societies. In this article, I examine the contested homosocial space that Black and white women shared in Saint-Domingue, a space fraught with multifarious articulations of scandal. As I track the colonists' uses of scandal, I explore how the construction of gender through whiteness renders Black women's autonomous sexuality and reproductive capacities as always already scandalous and therefore disruptive, threatening, and destabilizing to the colonial order.

Cynthia E. Orozco, Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist

Reviewed by: Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist by Cynthia E. Orozco Philip Samponaro (bio) Cynthia E. Orozco, Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist. University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 254. Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) is not a widely known name. At first glance, this native of Texas's Rio Grande Valley seems a typical borderlander/fronteriza woman of her era. Like most contemporary women of Mexican descent in the region, Sloss-Vento followed the prescribed paths of heterosexuality and domesticity by marrying and raising a family. Born working class, she labored at lower-middleclass jobs available to Mexican American women after graduating high school, first as a secretary during the 1930s and later as a jail matron. But Sloss-Vento broke the mold. She transcended the homosociality that restricted much of the Latina experience of her times by donning the roles of archivist, political activist, and citizen-commentator in the male-dominated Mexican American civil rights and Chicano movements that together spanned the 1920s through 1970s. She publicly critiqued the low wages, poverty, Bracero Program, and exploitative agribusiness that characterized life in the Rio Grande Valley. Sloss-Vento was a Democratic Party activist and, in the 1970s, supported the Raza Unida Party with its challenges to white-only politics. As a fronteriza, she was vocal about Mexico's policies that affected La Raza in Texas. By engaging directly in the masculine domains of civil rights, writing, and politics, Adela Sloss-Vento added the title of feminist to her many accomplishments. Still, Sloss-Vento remains almost invisible. Cynthia E. Orozco, Professor of History at Eastern New Mexico University–Ruidoso, remedies that marginalization with Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist. Orozco analyzes Sloss-Vento's correspondence with male civil rights figures and her numerous opinion pieces and letters published in newspapers from the 1930s into the 1970s. She argues that Sloss-Vento was the most important Mexican American woman civil rights activist and public intellectual in Texas, the only Tejana to write publicly on social issues across seven decades. Ultimately, Orzoco concludes that Sloss-Vento "was one of the most important Mexican American civil rights activists, public intellectuals, political party activists, and feminists of the twentieth century" (171). Orozco is concerned with how Sloss-Vento surpassed gender boundaries through political associations with men. For that reason, she highlights [End Page 141] Sloss-Vento's interaction with leaders of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the seminal Tejano civil rights organization founded in 1929 and a subject on which Orozco is an expert from previous scholarship. Typical of its era, LULAC operated as a male-only homosocial space. Sloss-Vento nonetheless established relations with three of LULAC's founders: J. Luz Sáenz, José Tomás "J. T." Canales, and her personal hero, Alonso Perales. By exploring relevant correspondence, Orozco demonstrates that Adela was a civil rights insider. Simultaneously, Orozco points out that Sloss-Vento wrote her letters at home as a wife and mother, making her "a gendered outsider" (11). The author underscores this theme by stressing that Sloss-Vento steadfastly believed that women had the right to advocate for social justice, affording her the praxis of infusing the civil rights struggle with a feminist framework. In the same manner, argues Orozco, Adela sought to democratize the white male establishment in Texas politics before the social movements of the 1960s gave other women entry after 1970. Orozco is well suited to have undertaken this study. The author is an established historian of Texas, women, civil rights, and politics. Moreover, she has a unique relationship with her subject as the only scholar to have corresponded directly with Sloss-Vento, doing so while an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s. Those letters, which Orozco draws upon here, offer invaluable insights. The author also enjoyed access to Sloss-Vento's private archive, still in family hands. Agent of Change contextualizes that resource as having, among other attributes, the most important collection on the Harlingen (TX) Convention of 1927, which led to...

Diffraction Patterns of Homoeroticism and Mimesis between Twelfth Night and She's the Man

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1602) is well-known for its homoeroticism, whereas the critical consensus concerning She’s the Man (dir. Andy Fickman), a 2006 film based on Twelfth Night, seems to be that it dampens the play’s homoerotic strategies and meanings in the translation to film. This paper argues that while specific elements are indeed dampened, homoeroticism is still firmly present in the movie, and the perceived curtailing of much of the play’s subversive energy does not explain the film’s queer legacy. Because of the different codes surrounding homoeroticism for Elizabethan drama and Hollywood cinema, the different contours of homosocial space within the two societies, and the Western invention of the homosexual as a distinct category in the time between the two eras, the queer potential of She’s the Man resides in different moments of the story, and is filtered through capitalist strategies of queerbaiting. Therefore, I aim to show the diffraction patterns of queer and trans desire between the two works. Specifically, the different approaches to mimesis shape this intra-action, including the place of women in mimetics; the specters of realism and psychoanalysis; shifting notions of gender and sexuality; and changes in audience tastes regarding bodily spectacle in cross-dressing stories.

Construcción de masculinidades en los internados del Colegio Nacional de La Plata (Argentina, 1910-1920)

Analizamos la construcción de masculinidades en los internados del Colegio Nacional de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Buenos Aires, Argentina) entre los años 1910, momento de su materialización y 1920, fecha de su disolución. Nos interesa indagar en las construcciones discursivas de los directivos de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata y de los encargados de los internados, que indican formas correctas e incorrectas de ser o transformarse en hombre, en una experiencia pedagógica novedosa para la época. Desde una metodología cualitativa, se propone el estudio de un caso, que resulta interesante en sí mismo. Encontramos que, en un espacio homosocial, se fomenta la formación de la responsabilidad y del carácter, en el afán de producir hombres fuertes y sanos. De este modo, se hace hincapié en una educación moral, ligada a la educación de las emociones y las sensibilidades, transmitiendo valores de clase como el honor y la caballerosidad.

Fun with Dick and Dick: Homosociality on r/MassiveCock

Social media and content-sharing platforms provide new opportunities for the circulation of not only professional and amateur porn productions but also “pornographic self-representation”. This study examines the interactions that occur when male pornographic self-representation is shared in an inclusive space that welcomes both straight and gay men to post dick pics and gaze/comment on them. Focusing on the Reddit forum, Massive Cock, we conducted a discourse analysis of a selection of posts, comments and account profiles collected over a seven-month period. Based on our findings, we contend that Massive is a homosocial space where homoerotic dick gazing reaffirms and disrupts the heterosexual–homosexual binary. Our findings point to an uneven dynamic in which the majority of the posters perform a straight identity, whereas the majority of commenters perform a gay identity. Their comments serve to disrupt hegemonic masculinity and, in turn, create a space that welcomes mostly straight and bi-curious performances of masculinity. Such performances are possible due to recent cultural shift away from homo-hysteria and towards a more inclusive heteromasculinity. Collectively these performances produce an inclusive “fraternity of the cock”, but it is one which maintains a heterocentric focus and function.

Slimming One's Way to a Better Self? Weight Loss Clubs and Women in Britain, 1967-1990.

Following the arrival of Weight Watchers UK in 1967, slimming clubs expanded rapidly in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Initially aimed at, and founded by, women, these organizations were complex emotional spaces in which female entrepreneurship and homosociality would unfold. Looking afresh at the relationship between women and commercialized weight loss, this article provides the first detailed study of the rise of the slimming club in mid-to-late-twentieth-century Britain. Slimming clubs proved lucrative business opportunities for some women; moreover, as homosocial spaces intersecting with women's everyday lives, they had the potential to be emotionally and psychologically empowering. A history of these organizations thus complicates feminist critiques of the slimming industry. This article draws on a variety of historical sources to piece together this forgotten history, including contemporary slimming guides, newspaper 'before-and-after' features, and oral history interviews with industry professionals and former slimming club members. Though members recognized that the commercial promise of transformation was shot through with contradictions, simultaneously, slimming clubs sparked enjoyment in being in the female body and provided a space away from domesticity.

A psychoactive paradox of masculinities: cohesive and competitive relations between drug taking Irish men

This article explores one dimension of Ireland’s illicit drug landscape: men’s predominance as recreational users of illicit psychoactive substances. It uses a gender lens on Irish men’s drug taking practices, to reveal how men’s drug use and drug intoxication converge with masculinities in paradoxical ways. Drawing from twenty in-depth interviews with Irish men who identified as illicit recreational drug users, their drug histories and experiences are unpacked; making visible the intersections between men’s use of illicit psychoactive substances, gender, culture and place. I explore how illicit drugs can have, at times, paradoxical uses within homosocial spaces. Men’s bedrooms, house parties, the street, nightclubs and pubs (albeit discretely) were common places where men engaged in the recreational use of illicit drugs, and it was in these spaces that men’s illicit drug use was interpreted as a symbolic activity with gendered meanings. By employing a masculinities lens to analyse men’s recreational use of illicit psychoactive substances, men’s drug taking interactions reveal intricacies within the gender order. I argue that illicit drugs are resources that some men utilise to navigate conventional understandings of masculinity, albeit in paradoxical ways.