Hegemonic forms of sexual desirability marginalize some men who have sex with men as sexually undesirable.One exampleisbears,asubcultureofmenwhohavesexwithmenwhoarefatter,hairier,andolderthanthegaymainstream.In a cultural context where the lean, muscular, and young male body predominates as the ideal, bears are pushed to the sidelines.Yet bears resist their normative desexualizationbyperformatively centering the fat male body as an object of sexual desire.Drawing on over 150 hr of ethnographic participant observation and 15 interviews with the Melbourne bear community, I explore how bears eroticize the bear body through social rituals, using beauty pageants and public nudity and sex as examples.By sexualizing each other, bears reject the norm that muscular, lean, and young bodies are the only legitimate objects of gay sexual desire.My findings demonstrate that hegemonic sexual desirability is not fatalistic: It can be resisted through communal practices that reframe otherwise denigrated bodies as sexy.I demonstrate how bears navigate antifatness by deploying spectacles that eroticize the fat, hairy, and older male body and show how bears offer a case study for how sexually subordinated groups may contest hegemonic desirability. Public Significance StatementBears-fat, hairy, and older men who have sex with men-face sexual exclusion in gay communities due to widespread antifatness.This study found that, in their own communities, bears use spectacles such as beauty pageants, underwear parties, and public sex to reframe themselves as sexy.Using spectacle as a framework may help researchers to understand how sexually marginal men navigate appearance stigma as they pursue sex, romance, and intimacy.
Grey et al. (Thu,) studied this question.