Bears resist hegemonic sexual desirability through spectacle: An ethnography of a gay subculture in Melbourne, Australia.

Abstract

Hegemonic forms of sexual desirability marginalize some men who have sex with men as sexually undesirable. One example is bears, a subculture of men who have sex with men who are fatter, hairier, and older than the gay mainstream. In a cultural context where the lean, muscular, and young male body predominates as the ideal, bears are pushed to the sidelines. Yet bears resist their normative desexualization by performatively centering the fat male body as an object of sexual desire. Drawing on over 150 hr of ethnographic participant observation and 15 interviews with the Melbourne bear community, I explore how bears eroticize the bear body through social rituals, using beauty pageants and pub..