scholarly journals "No Sorrow, No Pity": Intersections of Disability, HIV/AIDS, and Gay Male Masculinity in the 1980s

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Hrynyk
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Sexual Liberation ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
Disability Narratives ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Hiv Aids

This article examines narratives of disease and disability in Canada's gay and lesbian newspaper, The Body Politic (1971-1987), in order to demonstrate how gay male masculinity developed within a gay ableist culture deeply affected by HIV/AIDS. Over the course of the 1980s, two seemingly separate issues of disability and disease were woven together, establishing a dichotomy between the unhealthy and healthy, afflicted and non-afflicted, disabled and non-disabled body, which was marked by tension and, at times, hostility. As a result, two seemingly different discussions of disability and disease in The Body Politic intersected at the site of the gay male body, whereby issues of frailty and undesirability were shaped by pre-existing perceptions around disability. Narratives around disease and disability demonstrate how perceptions of bodily "failure" transferred from the disabled body onto the diseased body during the formative years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through imagery and text. The aesthetics and language of disability are particularly important for understanding how the disabled body and the HIV/AIDS-afflicted body were culturally framed because the stylization of the body itself was fundamental to the politics of sexual liberation and the formulation of visible lesbian and gay communities.

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

Fagchild Tools: Softening the Body Politic and Sexualizing Paul Ryan in a Pussy-Grabbing Era

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 602-618
Author(s):  
Queer J. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Expression ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Male Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women's Equality

AbstractThis article cautions against the strong impulse in the #MeToo movement to desexualize politics. Informed by queer theory, the article argues that the public desexualization imperative, represented by indignation toward President Donald Trump's pussy-grabbing antics and the concomitant, albeit justified, movement to expose decades of his sexual harassment of women, casts a shadow across queer citizens that chills sexual expression in democratic discourse and public life. The public desexualization imperative presents a double bind that creates, on one hand, public spaces that are less threatening and discriminatory to women and, on the other, public spaces that—from a queer white cisgender man's perspective, one whose only “marking” is his sexuality—erase queers’ valued differences. The author uses personal narrative to describe and apply tools (conceptualized as fagchild tools) that help navigate tensions between women's equality movements and queer efforts to gain fuller, more open sexual citizenship. The article focuses, first, on softening the body politic (implicitly a white cisgender heterosexual male body) to provide sociopolitical space for sexual pluralism. Second, the article uses the sexualization of House Speaker Paul Ryan to argue that making space for queer sexualities may require accommodating the expression of nonqueer sexualities, including those that most of us find offensive.

Contesting Hippismo

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Barr-Melej
Keyword(s):  
Moral Panic ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Liberation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Morality Politics

This chapter details the highly politicized moral panic that exploded onto the scene in response to hippismo—beginning with the public outcry over Piedra Roja—and emphasized such matters as sexual liberation and the use of marijuana as countercultural menaces to the Chilean family and nation. The chapter argues that as morality politics exposed mainstream values shared by leftists, centrists, and rightists alike, these groups also exploited such anxiety to score political and cultural points against their adversaries as the body politic polarized further.

Becoming-Other: (Dis)Embodiments of Race in Anne Rice’s Tale of the Body Thief

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Human Flesh

Abstract The vampire/human split in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles is structured like a racial split. Becoming a vampire constitutes an essence, a shared material difference that is not something humans can come close to understanding. In the process of erasing actual racial differences through the "Dark Gift," Rice relies on embodiments of ethnicity and racial specificity in her management of gay male desire (a major factor in her popularity). The complexity of the relationships that shift and multiply between desire, race, sexuality and otherness is captured most strikingly in the fourth novel of the series, Tale of the Body Thief. After establishing the gender and sexuality work accomplished by Lestat’s body-switching, the paper examines David Talbot's switch into a young male body himself. Talbot’s own becoming-other, and becoming-vampire thereafter, are instances of both general and specific racialized embodiment. Lestat's experience of the human flesh is different from Talbot's, and in fact does more to constitute identity as gender and sexuality than as race. Talbot's assimilation into Lestat's identity formation (erasing ethnicity by way of becoming an other) still produces a specificity, one that exoticizes a youthful otherness overcoded by Portugal, Africa, India and Brazil. However, the othered body can only be animated by an aging white British gentleman’s mind and manners.

‘The body that cannot be contained’: Queering mainstream psychology’s gay male body dissatisfaction imperative

Sexualities ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 622-643
Author(s):  
Alexander T Vasilovsky ◽  
Maria Gurevich
Keyword(s):  
Body Image ◽  
Body Dissatisfaction ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Explanatory Models ◽  
The Body ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Psychology Perspective ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Embodied Resistance

A sizable body of mainstream social psychological body image research suggests that gay men are more dissatisfied with their bodies than heterosexual men (Morrison et al., 2004). However, much of this research has been criticized for producing explanatory models that pathologize gay men by foregrounding homosexuality, irrespective of broader sociohistorical factors, as the source of gay male body dissatisfaction ( Filiault, 2010 ; Filiault and Drummond, 2009 ; Kane, 2009 , 2010 ) – what we refer to as psychology’s gay male body dissatisfaction imperative. Situated within a critical psychology perspective ( Teo, 2015 ), this article relies on the voices of 19 gay/queer participants to problematize psychology’s epistemological determinism. Their ‘talk’ was less interiorized and totalized than the models’ conceptualizations of gay male identity and body image, highlighting the need for models that instead explicate how gay men develop individual, embodied understandings of sexual and gender identity while navigating heterosexist, masculinist, and neoliberal discourses. We investigate the corporeal manifestations of discourse and pay specific attention to queer forms of embodied resistance.

Global Attention Needed to Combat HIV/AIDS Epidemic

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (9) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
SHARON WORCESTER
Keyword(s):  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
Hiv Aids
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document