The Transformed Gay Self: the Male Body and its Scenic Presence as Sites of Gay Self-Enunciation

Abstract

The human body has always functioned as one of the key material mediations for individuals to resort to in conveying their subjectivities. Yet until recently, as Holstein and Gubrium (2000: 197) observe, it has operated as a form of ‘absence presence’ in that, despite its ubiquitous nature, it rarely used to be discussed as a subject of analysis in interpretive sociology. With the proliferation of complex institutionalised ways to apprehend the human body, however, attention has increasingly turned to the material body as a signifying surface for identity construction. We are today, it is fair to say, more obsessed than ever with our bodies in terms of physical beauty, health and well-being. The rising number of day spas, medical facilities specialising in plastic surgery and the ever-increasing number of personal gyms all attest to this significant obsession with the human body as a sign for who and what we are.

Our hearts hurt in a thousand ways in equal and opposite universes, spinning in polar rotations around the axis of desire.

Nimmons (2002: 203)

A modified version of this chapter has appeared in Spanish as ‘El cuerpo y la presencia escénica como recursos narrativos para la enunciación de las identidades gay’ in Debats, No. 79, Winter 2002–3, Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnánim.