Interrogating Homonormativity

This book explores the concept of homonormativity and examines how the politics of homonormativity has shaped the lives and practices of gay men living primarily in the UK. The book adopts a case study approach in order to examine how homonormativity is shaping relationships within gay male culture, and between this culture and mainstream society. The book features chapters on same-sex marriage, HIV treatment, dating and hook-up culture, sexualized drug use and the world of work. Throughout these chapters, the book develops a conversation regarding the role that neoliberalism has played in defining gay male identities and practices in the UK and USA. If homonormativity is understood as the sexual politics of neoliberalism, this book considers to what extent those sexual politics pervade gay men’s sense of self, their relationships with each other, their experience of the spaces they occupy in everyday life, and the identities they inhabit in the workplace.blematizing the concept of homonormativity.

Sharif Mowlabocus’s Interrogating Homonormativity offers an updated, fresh and provocative look at how British gay men (and others) navigate sex, love, dating apps, HIV/AIDS prevention, drug use and protest politics in an age of fracturing neoliberal hegemony.  Using interviews to nuance his careful analysis, Mowlabocus shines a bright light on the current conundrums of queer everyday life. — Professor Lisa Duggan, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University, USA.

In Interrogating Homonormativity Sharif Mowlabocus offers a deeply nuanced exploration of the lives of gay men who have benefitted from increasing legal equalities and assimilation into normative middle class life. Like Mowlabocus I have material and affectively benefited from these legal changes and the commodification of sexual difference, but I also feel deeply ambiguous about them. At the heart of this book is an exploration of those contradictions – the difference that homonormativity makes in some gay men’s everyday lives, but also how the lived experiences of those men often exceeds the assumed boundaries of ‘the homonormative’, revealing the needs and desires that remain unmet by the legal equalities of the last two decades. This is an exceptional book, which interrogates the complex ways in which marriage equality has changed the place of gay men in contemporary (British) society, exposing how formal equality continues to overlook sexual difference and ends up obscuring demands for genuine equity. Its key message is that gay marriage, specific forms of consumption, and workplace equality and diversity initiatives are not intrinsically ‘homonormative’, but they continue to be appropriated by neoliberal actors to shore up heteronormativity and discipline gay men’s social and sexual lives. — Dr. Gavin Brown, Professor of Political Geography & Sexualities, Leicester, UK. 



This book considers how contemporary Western societies shape and discipline the ways that men can express same-sex intimacy and sexuality despite major gains in civil rights.  It’s not a book to castigate anyone for lack of moral correctness; it listens carefully to the voices of gay men interviewed on how they navigate through such current questions as marriage, cruising on Grindr, PrEP, chemsex, and corporate-identified employee groups rallying at Pride.  A pleasure to read, this book offers reflections that are refreshingly grounded in the experiences of gay men today dealing with a new world of legal rights in a context of declining public gay spaces and at best conditional public acceptance.
— Dr. Barry Adam, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Windsor, Canada. 

Sharif Mowlabocus is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, New York, USA. He holds a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex, UK, and is the author of several books and research articles. His research focuses primarily on Western gay male culture and its engagement with new forms of communication, mediation and representation.