Queer Male Body Image, from an actual queer male
In response to: Maddie McClouskey's Queer Male Body Image: A Feminist Crash Course I think that this, as it is written by an outsider (in many respects), lacks a nuanced understanding of power and (body) privilege in the gay community. Mostly the writer hit the nail with the hammer, but her analysis was quite noticeably limited with respect to a real understanding of queer body labels (e.g. twink, bear, wolf, etc.), race, and what these mean for queer men. Maddie McClouskey admits her analysis isn't perfect because she lacks the lived experience of a queer male, and that her post was an attempt to start a discussion. I hope to join in on her discussion with this post. For instance, bears have carved out a niche of power and (white) privilege for themselves. While they are by no means the dominant conception of beauty, bear communities (especially in larger cities) fairly distinct from, but still connected to, the more prototypical (often twink) gay scene. In this community/scene, the object and subject of desire is reconfigured in a way that is both admirably agentive and problematic. How is this admirably agentive? Well, the bears have reinvented what it means to be beautiful and desirable, and that's a pretty laudable feat. A bear friend of mine, for instance, is constantly explaining to me how bear-centric spaces and virtualities privilege the bear body - and that this body is assumed to be white. Another friend (not a bear) is in a serious relationship with a bear (who does not desire bears) and informs me that bears in the community have expressed distaste for this relationship. His partner (the bear) even warned my friend (not a bear) that some bears would try to exclude him when they went to a bear event together. This is not to say that my friend was persecuted for being thin, but rather it is demonstrating how bears have innovatively remade space and their community to represent a new idea of beauty - one that includes them. How is this problematic? Well, bear communities are largely white and largely privilege whiteness and masculinity. However, while I don't excuse white privilege and femmephobia, this is not unique to bear communities - it's pretty much a social fact for gay communities more generally. That being said, I'm sure there are limited examples of celebrated bear of colour and femme bear bodies - I just haven't seen them, nor are they typical. Despite this, some (actually, all) of my bear friends and bears I've asked think of "bear" as "white" unless otherwise stated (e.g. "he's a black bear"). This underscores the racial tensions that claims to body positive communities invoke. See: Why aren't there more bears of color in bear-centric media? This "bear example" is not the only instance where Maddie McClouskey's analysis insufficiently addressed race and how race is a necessary concept to understand queer male bodies. Already I have evidenced how certain (fat positive) gay communities are inaccessible or hard to access for queers of colour. I want to add to this that the queer of colour male body is also important in discussions of body image in queer male communities (something Maddie doesn't even mention). Whiteness, white facial features, and white bodies are almost a necessity of queer beauty - unless exoticized or fetishized, which I'm sure only strengthens my argument that we need to include an analysis of race in this discussion. "No asians, no blacks, whites only" is an all too familiar reality online and in the club. "Asian porn" "big black dick" and the like are all too real reminders that our bodies are just sites of exotic lust. To not mention race or white privilege even once in an article about gay male body image is to tacitly accept the oppressive realities that queers of colour face.
