Queer Masculinity Research Articles

A Qualitative Study on Queer College Student Desire

While much work in the realm of higher education research has concerned LGB(T)/queer identity development, little work has sought to explore the experiences of queer students with particular attention to their sexual and romantic habits and desires. Moreover, little to no attention has been paid to how the sexual and romantic desires of queer college students are shaped by normative discourses of race, sexuality, and gender. In this qualitative study, I have sought to elucidate the experiences of queer masculine college students to better understand how their sexual desires and performances intersect with systems of domination. The findings of this work suggest that oppressive systems—such as racism, patriarchy, and trans/queerphobia—are pervasive discourses in the sexual and romantic desires of queer, masculine college students. Such findings indicate that higher education practitioners should center discussions of racism and internalized queerphobia within educational interventions meant to address topics such as healthy relationships, “hook up culture,” and safer sexual practices.

‘The Eyes of an Intellectual Vampire’: Michael Field, Vernon Lee and Female Masculinities in Late Victorian Aestheticism

Abstract This article reframes debate on the intersections of female aestheticism and cultural dissidence by focusing on the construction of queer masculinities at the end of the nineteenth century. Looking at the diary of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), it examines the descriptions of Vernon Lee, Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thompson and Maud Cruttwell during the Fields’ trip to Italy in 1895. The ambivalent presentation of these figures in the diary reveals a conflicted legacy of aestheticism, centred around the inheritance, interpretation and embodiment of queer masculinity. The article argues that the Fields developed themes associated with a previous generation of male aesthetes in order to articulate gender difference between themselves and other female-bodied aesthetes. In particular, it considers how the gender-variant Fields rejected Lee, Anstruther-Thomson and Cruttwell’s trans-masculinities as perversions of their sex.

Transformative emotional labour, cosmetic surgery, and masculinity: Rural/urban migration in China's gay commercial sex industry

This article draws upon ethnographic data from 101 rural‐to‐urban migrant gay sex workers in northern China to reveal how rural migrants survive in urban China. The interviewees provide evidence that the marginality they experience as sex workers is sometimes related to a spatial narrative. In China, these migrant sex workers are frequently stigmatized by discourses that present them as ‘tropical beings’—from rural and subtropical places in China's south. To overcome marginality, they adopt embodiments of emotional labour which enhance their economic survivability in China's urban gay commercial sex industry. Upon arrival in metropolitan areas, migrant gay sex workers quickly learn they must shed many trappings of their former rural life. Many undergo cosmetic surgeries to conform their physical appearance to the soft‐masculine urban standards deemed most attractive and appealing. Since emotional labour is the commodification of private emotions, intended to be sold for profit, these men diligently extinguish those negative markers which reflect the everyday rurality of their masculinity. Conforming to urban standards of queer masculinity and emotional labour increases their chances of survivability in the commercial sex industry.

Quare Memory in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy

This essay adapts David Cregan's concept of ‘queer memory’ – a form of memory defined ‘by exclusion rather than inclusion’ – to the author of The Quare Fellow, analysing narrative gaps in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy in order to better understand its construction of cultural memory. Situating Borstal Boy within a growing canon of Irish writing on coercive confinement, the essay contends that draft versions act as an important component of textual memory, as can be seen by the more explicit portrayal of queer sexuality in Behan's drafts. Both in its transgressive portrayal of queer masculinity, and in the ‘quare’ narrative strategies used to incorporate this material into the published text, Borstal Boy presents an author whose ‘quareness’ is a key part of his literary aesthetic.

Biker Boys, Muscle Cars, Hollywood Men

This article examines how the ironic construction of queer masculinity from biker culture, a realm of consumer fetishism and hetero-masculinity, in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), influences Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive. As Anger’s film appropriates pop-culture images and icons of biker culture, fetishes of post-Second World War American masculinity, Refn uses overt references to Anger’s film to wage a similar reappropriation of muscle car culture, in the process challenging contemporary images of heterosexual masculinity in Drive. Like Anger, Refn relies upon the dynamics of fetishism and postmodernism’s illumination of the distance between sign and object to subvert muscle cars’ associations with masculine violence and rivalry, mobilising them instead to exploit the inherent multivocality of the fetishised object, seizing the car (and its mobility) as a getaway vehicle to escape prescriptions of identity and limiting definitions of gender and sexuality.

(Un)Naturality and Chinese queer masculinities on Ailaibulai

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the discourses of desire featured on the online queer reality TV program Ailaibulai. The show aired on LeTV in 2016 and was co-produced by a Chinese corporation—Blue City—that targets queer groups. This paper illuminates the hierarchized masculinities and widespread effeminophobia that are represented on the show. My analysis suggests that the show’s participants use the discourse of (bu)ziran—“(un)naturality” in English—to distinguish and hierarchize masculinities through physicality, performance, and gender identification. Naturality is deemed a necessity for desirable masculinity, while perceived unnatural features marginalize participants’ masculinities. It also complicates the case by defining two types of unnaturality as the results of being damaged/polluted and being polished/elevated, respectively. Unnaturality as a result of polishing natural materials can nevertheless increase sexual capital, which can be achieved through men’s personal features such as a muscular physique. Additionally, this paper demonstrates how Chinese queer people contest certain types of white masculinity in the transnational context, because Ailaibulai participants only value a particular white masculinity.

The male body politic: Straight strippers, gay spaces, and queer masculinities

AbstractStudies of women and gender relations promoted by feminist movements have had a steady progress, which has allowed recognizing many of the phenomena, characteristics and experiences of women, while studies of men have been late and narrowly limited themselves to studies on violence as a characteristic of masculinity. However, it is essential to recognize how masculinities are constructed, and explore their changes and the social mechanisms that give them continuity. It is necessary to examine them, map them, recognize their diversity and identify the practices that favor both their continuity and as their change. Recognizing different forms used to materialize them, reproduce them and inscribe them performatively in the bodies of men will allow us to point out those guidelines that support the success of public policies that promote equality between women, men, girls and boys, as well as the eradication of gender violence. In an effort to learn about an example of diverse masculinities, I conducted postdoctoral research among heterosexual men who strip for other men (strippers), I wanted to know how masculinities conform in environments that favor the overturning of patriarchal practices and that contravene heteronormativity.

‘Tum Log Yeh Shabd Ke Peechhey Kyon Parh Jaate Ho?’: Language, abjection and queer masculinity in Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh

ABSTRACTThis article examines how the representation of abject masculinity resists queer erasure in Hansal Mehta’s 2016 film Aligarh. Shortly after the Delhi High Court delegitimized the homophobic Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the national media highlighted the assault, suspension and subsequent death of Srinivas Ramachandra Siras, a professor of Marathi literature at Aligarh Muslim University. Aligarh revisits the tragic fate of Siras, whose enforced abjection was catalyzed by not only his sexual orientation, but also the vernacular ‘wars’ that sanction region-specific forms of masculinity. The film articulates a mistrust of agency implicit in language. The abject male body in Aligarh becomes a source of resistance, rupturing the rigid codification enforced equally by the language of law and by neoliberal discourses of queer activism. Siras’s abjection, his insistence on the untranslatability of inchoate feelings and valorization of silences, pauses and emotional excess enacts a subversion of the symbolic order and a return to the pre-linguistic realm. The film posits abject queer masculinity in spectral opposition to postcolonial norms of gender and sexuality.

Beyond Shame in Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016)

Shame is frequently racialized, gendered, and sexualized. The 2016 film Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins, is a cultural touchstone in these terms. Through its success at the 89th Academy Awards, it brought to mainstream audiences a complex depiction of black, queer masculinities that move beyond shame. Moonlight follows a black man through three episodes in his life as he seeks to find agency in hypermasculine spaces wherein his potential queerness and aversion to dominance and aggression leads to isolation and shame. Through the lens of queer temporalities, I show how conventional queer narratives are subverted in Moonlight through opportunities of intimacy. I offer an analysis of the film’s depiction of queerness as an unfixed category and show how the aesthetics underscore the idea of indeterminacy.

Some Knights are Dark and Full of Terror: The Queer Monstrous Feminine, Masculinity, and Violence in the Martinverse

ABSTRACTViolence is intimately connected with the body, and in particular with male embodied masculinity, in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-forthcoming) and its television adaptation Game of Thrones (2011–2019). While many scholars and media commentators have decried the series’ depictions of aggression, in this essay I focus on intersections of violence and male embodiment to reveal a more complex negotiation of normative masculinity than has been acknowledged in existing scholarship. A psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer reading of Martinverse constructions of monstrous masculine violence – by some of the series most abhorrent characters – Joffrey Baratheon, Gregor Clegane, and Ramsay Bolton – indicate how it is critiqued by association with the monstrous feminine. This critique involves a circularity of horror wherein these monstrous men both enact abjection and are subjected to it, a process that reveals the inability of heteropatriarchal violence to produce anything but destruction. Specifically, I argue that the normative male body and phallic masculinity are foregrounded alongside the symbols of the monstrous feminine. These instances rupture the illusion that a stable and coherent masculine subjectivity can materialise through horrifying depictions of heteronormative masculinity.

The queer coat: Konstantin Goncharov’s fashion, Russian masculinity and queer world building

I re-assess Russian sartorial economics of the 1990s by examining fashion by Konstantin Goncharov, who was credited for styling Russian rock stars and making costumes for artistic projects. I focus on the relationship between queer masculinity and sartorial practice. The former relies on a visual code encompassing a range of multi-platform, cross-media strategies and a network of references. The latter refers to a community of individuals engaged in the production of a characteristic style across different sites. The article proposes the concept of queer world-building, which brings together object-oriented and community-oriented practices. Central to Goncharov’s world is ‘the queer coat’, a costume designed for his clientele and a historically grounded metaphor for Russian society. It designates the process of creative re-modelling of pre-Soviet and Soviet aesthetics, producing a complex cultural exchange challenging dominant notions of masculinity. Goncharov’s cross-platform and intermedial work captures the spirit of multi-centric cultural activity of the 1990s.

Queering the stitch: Fashion, masculinity and the postsocialist subject

In my article, I analyse some of the ways in which Gosha Rubchinskiy, Demna Gvasalia and Lotta Volkova might be said to ‘queer’ masculinity. I draw parallels between their work and the modernist, utopian, Constructivist project of Soviet fashion designers of the 1920s such as Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov’ Popova. Most importantly, both groups of artists share a desire to organize their fashion practice within a broader ideological project. At the heart of their respective projects is a fundamental challenge to conventional notions of gender in fashion, and in the fashion industry. In both cases, the ‘queering’ of gender norms, distinctions and hierarchies, both on and off the catwalk, is designed to produce a radical transformation of the relationship between the fashioned object and the fashionable, consuming subject. As far as today’s post-Soviet fashion designers are concerned, by the way in which they either queer masculinity or perform their own, queer brand of masculinity, they produce a new, utopian subject. Far from being the antithesis of the Constructivist project, then, this post-socialist utopian body can be seen as constituting perhaps its most spectacular realization to date.

Always endangered, never extinct: Exploring contemporary butch lesbian identity in the UK

This article presents empirical data from survey research into lesbian and queer masculinities in the United Kingdom, conducted in 2017, which garnered over two hundred responses. Four dominant themes emerged from the data gathered. These themes addressed: distinctions and relationships between the sexed body and gender identity; the contradictions of identifying with masculinities while critiquing hegemonic masculinity; a sense of anxiety or loss around a perceived decline of lesbian community and identities within it, particularly the identity of butch lesbian; and also the great variety of trans identities and how they are defined and distinct. There were many considered responses under all the above themes on the changing meaning of the butch lesbian signifier, from forty self-identified butch lesbians as well as from those identifying with other terms, and this topic is the focus of this article.I will explore the meaning and resonance of the butch lesbian identity in the UK context, and the sometimes rocky relationship to the explosion of newer terms describing sex and gender identities, such as masculine of centre (MOC), non-binary (NB), gender non-conforming (GNC) or transmasculine. While there was some unease that newer terms might or may have already eclipsed the category of butch, alongside a common assertion that the category of butch is considered old fashioned, ‘butch’ was still a term that valiantly persisted and held sentimental and political value. Many participants were keen that this identity be included and distinguished in the contemporary rainbow of possibilities for sexuality and gender identities in the UK.

A Series of Staggering Heartbreaks

Typically, the narrative surrounding intimate partner violence (IPV) involves men as perpetrators not victims. This is in part due to both low reporting from men and heteronormative expectations of masculinity. Furthermore, gay male victims are even less frequently discussed. In this autoethnographic article, I reflect on the power structure within violent same-sex relationships and the resulting loss of agency, self-worth, and personal identity victims experience. Because the conversation regarding IPV is often focused on the perpetrator rather than the victim, I intentionally leave the perpetrators anonymous and these experiences vague to instead focus attention on the trauma experienced by gay men. It is my hope this approach will render more intelligible the negotiations of agency, silence, and the performance of queer masculinity that victims experience. This article is neither about the act nor the perpetrator; rather it is about the response by and to the victim.

No woman’s land? Revisiting border zone denizens

This article presents empirical data from survey research into lesbian and queer masculinities in the United Kingdom, conducted in 2017, which garnered over two hundred responses. Dominant themes emerged which addressed the differences between the sexed body and gender identity; the contradictions of identifying with masculinities while critiquing hegemonic masculinity; a sense of anxiety or loss around a perceived decline of lesbian community and identities within it, particularly the identity of butch lesbian; and, finally, the variety of trans identities and how they are defined and distinct. The focus in this article is on the latter theme, the variety of trans identities, and particularly the shared experiences of individuals across different identifications. Namely, I consider how butch, non-binary, and queer individuals reported possible areas of resonance and recognition with transgender or transmasculine experiences or the experiences of trans men. I argue that rumors of “border wars” have been exaggerated, as these territories are often overlapping. In addition, some individuals inhabit multiple sites of identity or shift between and across shared sites. Degrees of sex and gender dysphoria were not only reported by trans-identified individuals, and while not all such individuals adopted a trans identity, this was not necessarily because these border zone denizens felt a strong connection to femaleness or womanhood; often far from it.

‘He is rather peculiar, perhaps’: Reading Mr Rochester’s Coarseness Queerly

This article re-examines the accusation of coarseness directed at Edward Fairfax Rochester, the male protagonist of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Elizabeth Rigby condemned Rochester as coarse for challenging normative modes of male gender and sexuality. In re-thinking Rigby’s critique, this paper provides an original reading of Brontë’s novel that explores Rochester’s ‘coarse’ behaviours as representative of queer masculinity. Drawing on contemporary queer theoretical discourse, the article suggests that Brontë’s male protagonist articulates a range of queer masculine possibilities that valuably registers a resistance to dominant ways of being in the nineteenth century. As such, I propose that Jane Eyre offers insight into the flexible ways with which Brontë conceived of male subjectivity.

Suburra. La serie as "Patrimonio internazionale / International Patrimony"

This essay investigates fascinations surrounding glamorized criminals by looking at how recent Italian history and queer bodies are represented, negotiated, and received in Italy’s first made-for-Netflix series Suburra. La serie (2017 - ). In many ways, the series is a distinctly Italian production, especially in terms of the popular mafia-corruption plot that is based upon real life events. However, Suburra. La serie is a transnational production that engages viewers outside of Italy. This essay pays attention to the series’ interesting marketing strategy that flagrantly draws attention to fictional/historical consistencies, before addressing the physical allure and charisma of criminal antiheroes who appear trapped in a perpetual adolescence. Most importantly, I address how Suburra. La serie’s singularity as a transnational co-production allows for a unique representation of gender and sexuality on Italian small screens, as it marks an opening up of a mainstream space on the small screen to tell stories from the perspective of a non-normative sexual orientation. Suburra. La serie engages in a representation of queer masculinity that is distinctive in relation to Italian serial drama as a whole and especially in relation to serial dramas that depend upon sympathetic perpetrators to create relationships with viewers. As I argue, Suburra. La serie is a queer text with an address to viewers spanning continents, cultures, and languages.

Unbearable Fadistas: António Variações and Fado as Queer Praxis

Antonio Variacoes’s first single, Povo que lavas no rio/Estou alem (1982), offers a radical version of Amalia Rodrigues’s fado “Povo que lavas no rio” (1962). This article considers Variacoes as fadista in order to think fado as queer praxis. Though Variacoes's debut release was a commercial success, his turn as fadista provoked critical derision for what, I argue, is a trans formation of the genre’s gendered codes and practices. Variacoes's queer masculinity gives body and voice to the transgressive sexuality enmeshed within gendered and fetishized repertoires of fado that are most recognizable in the myths and voices of the genre's divas. This article locates Variacoes within a fado genealogy, from Maria Severa to Amalia Rodrigues, of performers who have similarly been unbearable in body and voice. The purpose of this is to draw attention to fado's affective dispersions of sex and reveal how the genre has coalesced in relation to queer tactics and people throughout its history.

‘Poison ivy’: Queer masculinities, sexualities, homophobia and sexual violence

This paper critically engages with notions of sexualities and male rape, using the concepts of heteronormativity and the social construction of sexualities to make sense of male sexual victimization. It offers primary data, which were collected via qualitative interviews and qualitative questionnaires involving police officers and practitioners working in voluntary agencies ( N = 70). The theoretical framework of heteronormativity is used to elucidate the data, drawing on issues and notions of sexualities that shape the ways in which state and voluntary agencies perceive, respond to and deal with male victims of rape. The aim of this paper, then, is to explore how notions of sexualities affect British state and voluntary agencies’ understanding of male rape and their views of men as victims of rape. I argue that state and voluntary agencies see male rape solely as a homosexual issue. As a result, heterosexual male rape victims, in particular, fear that societies will see them as homosexuals potentially drawing in homophobic reactions, responses or appraisals from others because rape challenges men’s heterosexual identity and sense of self as a ‘real’ man. Owing to the myth that male rape is a homosexual issue, and owing to heteronormativity, rape between men is seen as ‘consensual’ because anal penetration is considered to be an activity for gay men. Thus, sexist, homophobic and disbelieving attitudes emerge.

On Oyèrónké Oyèwumí, colonial Afro-masculinities and the subjection of African cultural praxis in Inxeba

The understudied work of Oyeronkẹ Oyewumi has pointed to the incommensurability of the westernised phenomenon of gender with African conceptions of personhood and social identity. Oyewumi’s work has challenged the idea of gender as a universal identity and subject position, not by arguing for a distinct form of gender embodiment that is African in its phenomenology, but by historically and conceptually demonstrating that gender is a product of western social constructs not universally related or applicable to African social schemas. Oyewumi presents the argument that the presence of gender as a social signifier of African peoples’ identity (whom prior to colonialism inhabited a cultural order without gender as a primary organising principle) occurs at the co-instance of western cultural domination and colonialisation of Africa. Relying on such a view toward African society’s historically non-gendered social organisation schemas, this paper offers a critique of the film Inxeba (Trengove 2017), arguing that, contrary to the popular reception of the film as a gender progressive representation of African queer identity and its attendant liberation from a purportedly hetero-patriarchal African culture, the film in effect constitutes the inverse. In essence, the reception around Inxeba inadvertently re-inscribes colonial gender grammars into an African cultural praxis and in the process undercuts African cultural autonomy for self-progression on its own terms. I further argue that the film’s thematic treatment of both a purported “African hetero-patriarchal masculinity” and an “African Queer masculinity” could be read as merely mimicking western/colonial gender embodiment discourse.