Spanish gay male subjectivity, body, intimacy, and affect on Instagram

This article analyzes how a neoliberal understanding of identity shapes gay subjectivity, body, affect, and intimacy in digital environments, particularly Instagram. This social media has become one of the most relevant elements of gay subculture in Western countries, including Spain. Neoliberalism usually reduces gayness to a sort of global marketable brand which is understood as an individual attribute rather than a collective identity that provides common ground to fight for LGBT rights and against homophobia. Drawing on previous research on online self-representation and gay subjectivity, we specifically explore this global pattern in Spanish gay users of Instagram. To this end, we examine posts containing the tag #gaySpain uploaded between April and May 2020. In general, our research shows that the profiles tend to provide narratives of successful personal self-engineering and self-promotion, rather than activism and collective empowerment. These narratives present the gay body as a commercial product or something to be admired and consumed, whilst affect is part of an online highly ritualized performance and communication, and by no means a force for social change. As part of self-representation in social media, intimacy is constructed on Instagram for a large audience as an attractive example of a thriving gay life; in simple terms, Instagram has become gay show business like other manifestations of this subculture such as the Pride march.

“Love” and (Male) Subjectivity in Hirabayashi Taiko’s “In the Charity Ward”

This chapter traces the discourses of international feminism in the 1920s, specifically the way critics and intellectuals, inspired by European writings on sexology and women's emancipation, promoted the notion of a rational self-willed subjectivity, encapsulated in the term “character,” as the basis for conceiving the sameness between men and women. Hirabayashi Taiko's 1927 short story, “In the Charity Ward,” also has an important link to the earthquake, but the narrative more directly engages liberal feminist discourses surrounding women and maternity. Hirabayashi's writing also occasions a larger interrogation of the assumptions of gender, class, and nation that have undergirded all texts treated in the previous chapters. Hirabayashi directly roots out the male-gendered foundations of narration that writers like Tanizaki and Kawabata sought to displace but could not fully challenge. In this way, she is able to much more radically challenge the ideologies of love, character, and daily life that both writers repudiated. Hirabayashi's text, moreover, constituted a feminist intervention in Yokomitsu's attempt to render a disruptive phenomenology, pushing his project of new sensations further to mount a more trenchant subversion of the phallogocentric frameworks of knowledge and experience.

‘lips move, uttering inaudibly’: The Female Voice in Samuel Beckett's …but the clouds …

While the dialogue between Samuel Beckett's …but the clouds… and W. B. Yeats's ‘The Tower’ has been thoroughly examined, much less attention has been paid to the female voice that inaudibly recites the poetic fragment in what constitutes the teleplay's chief intertextual gesture towards Yeats's poem. Aligning this oversight with the more pervasive disregard within Beckett Studies to the gendered specificity of Beckett's voices, this essay elaborates the absent presence of the female voice in the teleplay – crystallised in the image of W's silently moving lips – from the interlocking perspectives of intertextuality, technology, and spectatorship. It draws attention to Beckett's sustained preoccupation with the female voice during the composition process, as well as the intertextual and technological operations through which he orchestrates its paradoxical status. Even though as a speech-deprived female body functions as the locus of these overlapping processes, I argue that … but the clouds… ultimately subverts associations of the feminine with discursive inadequacy and bodily impairment; if anything, Beckett here attributes deficiency and incompletion to male subjectivity and the televisual medium.

Kategoria traumy w Kai Silverman koncepcji „męskiej podmiotowości na marginesach”

W artykule autor przedstawia znaczenie pojęcia traumy w koncepcji męskiej podmiotowości rozwijanej przez Kaję Silverman w książce pt. "Male Subjectivity at the Margins". Rozprawa Silverman pochodzi z 1992 roku, a więc z czasów, gdy powstawały kluczowe dla współczesnych gender i queer studies rozprawy Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick czy Pierre’a Bourdieu (nieco później, bo w 1995 roku, została opublikowana równie kluczowa praca Raewyn W. Connell). Koncepcja Silverman ma podobny rozmach co wspomniane koncepcje, lecz nigdy nie zyskała takiej popularności i nie stała się kluczowa dla badań genderowych początku XXI wieku. Autor nie rozważa w artykule przyczyn, dla których tak się stało, lecz stara się ukazać drzemiący w niej potencjał teoretyczny.

Gay and happy: (Proto-)homonormativity, emotion and popular culture

To be happy has become an overwhelming imperative for contemporary gay men. Interrogating the shame-to-happiness narratives of British gay male celebrities, this article expands the concept of homonormativity by exploring its emotional dimensions. I argue that, in popular representations, happiness has become a form of proto-homonormativity, demarcated as a prerequisite to a ‘successful’ (homonormative) gay life. I conceptualize proto-homonormativity as an emergent paradigm of gay male subjectivity, which is shaped by broader valorizations of authenticity and self-therapy which permeate neoliberal media cultures. As articulated by gay celebrities, proto-homonormative discourses acknowledge the barriers to happiness that gay men face in heteronormative societies, yet reproduce heteronormativity by demarcating individualized processes of emotional self-work as the route to becoming happy.