Intimacy collapse: Temporality, pleasure, and embodiment in gay hook-up app use

This article maps key tensions in contemporary, mediatized gay male sexual culture by focusing on hook-up app use. Based on data generated through a situated and visual interview technique, the paper gather experiences from hook-up app users in the U.K. Concerned with how understandings and usage of hook-up apps are bound up with normative evaluations of their ability to produce “good” intimacy, I suggest integrating analysis of practice and infrastructural capacities with critical intimacy theory. This is captured in the concept intimacy collapse of which I examine three types: one between immediacy and foresight, another between organic and representational pleasure objects, and a third between personal and social acts of looking. The analysis demonstrates that intimacy collapses in hook-up apps produce new (in)visibilities, anxieties and opportunities that are distributed unevenly across the disparate online cultures and identities that make up gay culture.

A Critique of “Mascquerade”

This article begins by identifying the demand for “masc” in gay male digital cultures as a repressive phenomenon. Drawing on a key queer alt-right text by Jack Donovan in which “masc” is explicitly theorized, it shows that its disciplinary logic is distinct from homonormativity. The homo/hetero binary is explicitly rejected, and the perverse structure is weaponized as a repressive mechanism suited to a postnormative environment. Under these conditions, critiques of normativity and homonationalism are unable to provide an effective counter because the subjects they address have stopped caring. The article describes perverse homogenization processes as “homotribalism,” arguing that they provide an erotic basis for ethnonationalism. It then provides a detailed reading of Call Me by Your Name (2017), claiming that its striking contemporary relevance during the first year of the Trump administration followed from working through the question of homotribal desire within liberalism.

Inclusive masculinity and Czechia youth

In this, the first investigation of inclusive masculinities among 18- to 19-year-old Czech students, the authors interviewed 19 participants from a rural part of the country. The purpose of this research was to identify attitudes of young, rural, Czech men toward homosexuality and examine for perceived generational difference compared to men who emerged under communism. Results showed evidence of inclusive masculinities for these rural youth based in three principal categories: (1) positive attitudes toward homosexuality; (2) openness to a bromance with a gay male (dependent on gender typicality); and (3) perceived generational differences in gay acceptance compared to their parents’ generation. Overall, results therefore show that young men in this rural part of Czechia are enacting more inclusive forms of masculinity than possible under communist rule.

Archaeologies of Gossip: AIDS in Contemporary Gay Fiction

<p>Queer criticism is now in its third decade and, as critical orthodoxy, running up against its own limitations. What, for example, is a discipline preoccupied with the unspoken, the marginal and the blurring of gender boundaries to do with Edmund White’s unambiguously gay, masculine “red unsheathed fury of the third penis of the afternoon”? The Western AIDS novel is, overwhelmingly, a product of a historically precise, explicitly gay, male experience. This thesis seeks unapologetically to engage with this writing on its own terms, eschewing the queer critical lens as insufficient, and, rather, reading for a specifically gay aesthetic. Grounded in a broader overview of both AIDS novels and existing criticism, this thesis consists of extended close readings of two exemplary AIDS novels: Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Firstly, I articulate the centrality of the gay sexual body to the representation of AIDS in The Farewell Symphony, tracing its representation of the disease through the epidemiological mapping of the virus itself, within the highly specific culture of gay New York in the 1970s. Secondly, I examine the way in which the re-imagination of a selective tradition of gay literary predecessors in The Line of Beauty, specifically Henry James and Oscar Wilde, provides an aesthetic solution to articulating AIDS.</p>

Archaeologies of Gossip: AIDS in Contemporary Gay Fiction

<p>Queer criticism is now in its third decade and, as critical orthodoxy, running up against its own limitations. What, for example, is a discipline preoccupied with the unspoken, the marginal and the blurring of gender boundaries to do with Edmund White’s unambiguously gay, masculine “red unsheathed fury of the third penis of the afternoon”? The Western AIDS novel is, overwhelmingly, a product of a historically precise, explicitly gay, male experience. This thesis seeks unapologetically to engage with this writing on its own terms, eschewing the queer critical lens as insufficient, and, rather, reading for a specifically gay aesthetic. Grounded in a broader overview of both AIDS novels and existing criticism, this thesis consists of extended close readings of two exemplary AIDS novels: Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Firstly, I articulate the centrality of the gay sexual body to the representation of AIDS in The Farewell Symphony, tracing its representation of the disease through the epidemiological mapping of the virus itself, within the highly specific culture of gay New York in the 1970s. Secondly, I examine the way in which the re-imagination of a selective tradition of gay literary predecessors in The Line of Beauty, specifically Henry James and Oscar Wilde, provides an aesthetic solution to articulating AIDS.</p>

Teaching out loud: Queer futurity within high school settings

The purpose of this study was to examine how four openly gay male music teachers in distinct US regions enacted Jose Muñoz’s vision of queer futurity within their respective campus environments. Data included field notes from a minimum of six class observations and 59 interviews divided between teachers, administrators, instructional colleagues in other subject areas, students, and students’ parents. Administrators at each school were highly supportive and indicated that gay representation provided a valuable contribution to their school’s commitment to diverse representation. Data also showed that when teachers were open about their sexuality, students felt empowered to live life by their own personal standards, rather than bowing to peer pressure.

Diana, the Challenger: A Feminist Figure of Power and Salvation in Hollywood Feminist Fantasy Wonder Woman (2017)

Jenkins (2017) Wonder Woman is a portrayal of the traditional role of feminism, in which masculine traits including courage, strength, leadership, independence, and assertiveness are used to overwhelm male-dominant society, while manhood as a masculine trait is challenged by a woman constantly striving for power and authority. Marriage is shown as a failed philosophy in the movie, while men are shown just a minimal need to procreate. ‘Wonder Woman’ has an extensive gay male and lesbian fan base. This task approaches Wonder Woman with a semiotic and cultural examination to perceive how her character is comprised of some syntagmas that empower this sort of identification like same-sex society, battling bigotry, discovering one's place, and flourishing in transformation. The analysis shows that the virtue of fighting for peace in Diana has been compromised with the amalgamation of feminists’ radical approach. She has been presented as a female rebellion, while the rightful cause of the caretaker feminists has been degenerated by the amalgamating of bad feminism with good feminism. Keywords: masculine traits, male-dominant society, feminism, syntagmas, same-sex society, female rebellion