Social (In)Queery

By Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe

Originally posted at Feminist Reflections

Robin Thicke’s song, “Blurred Lines,” achieved international recognition in 2013. But the lyrics were also heavily criticized as promoting sexual violence by celebrating “blurred lines” around sexual consent. Indeed, the song and video prompted an online photo essay in which women and men are depicted holding up signs with words they heard from their own rapists—some of which were almost direct quotes from Thicke’s song. The song received a great deal of negative and positive press all at the same time. The media attention seemed to prove the media adage that any coverage is good coverage if Thicke’s continued celebrity is any measure.

It’s not a new argument to suggest that many elements of what feminist scholars refer to as “rape culture” are embedded in seemingly pleasurable elements of pop culture, like songs, movies, television shows etc. And Robin Thicke’s song served as an example to many of how we not only tolerate rape culture—but how we celebrate it and render it “sexy.” Recently, Rebecca Traister discussed just how much rape culture even informs what we think of as “good sex” in her piece “The Game is Rigged: Why Consensual Sex Can Still be Bad.” In it, Traister challenges the notion that all consensual sex is good and shows just how messy the debate about what qualifies as “consensual” really is. In many ways, our national discussion around sexual assault and consent is taking up themes raised by feminists in the 1980s about what actually qualifies as consent in a society in which violence against women is considered sexy.

Compared with “Blurred Lines,” Justin Bieber’s newly released hit single, “What Do You Mean?” has been subject to less critique. The notion that women do not actually know what they want and that they are notoriously bad and communicating their desires (sexual and otherwise) is pervasive. In the song, Bieber asks the woman with whom he’s interacting, “What do you mean? / Ohh ohh ohh/ When you nod your head yes / But you wanna say no / What do you mean?” The lack of clear consent isn’t just present in the song; it is what provides the sexual tension. It’s part of what is intended to make the song “sexy.”

Sexualizing women’s sexual indecision is an important part of the way rape culture works. It is one way that conversations about consent often over-simplify a process that is and should be much more complex. The song itself presents Bieber nagging the woman to whom he’s singing to make a decision about their relationship. But there are many elements suggesting that the decision she’s being asked to make is more immediate as well—not only about the larger relationship, but about a sexual interaction in the near future. Throughout the song, the click of a stopwatch can be heard as a beat against which Bieber presses the woman to make a decision while berating her for the mixed signals she has been sending him.

Image from Bloomingdale’s 2015 holiday catalog.

Bieber is presented as the “good guy” throughout the song by attempting to really decipher what the woman actually means. Indeed, this is another element of rape culture: the way in which we are encouraged to see average, everyday guys as “not-rapists,” because rapists are the bad guys who attack women from bushes (at worst) or simply get them drunk at a party (at best).*  The controversy over the ad in Bloomingdale’s recent 2015 holiday catalog urging readers to “spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking” shows that this kind of rape culture is also casually promoted in popular culture as well.  But, the larger discourse that Bieber’s song plays a role in promoting is the notion that women do not know what they mean or want. Bieber plays the role of someone simultaneously pressuring her for sexual advance (“Said we’re running out of time”), helping her work through her feelings (“What do you mean?”), and demanding results (“Better make up your mind”). And, like the Bloomingdale’s advertisement, this is not sexy.

Indeed, the music video (above) takes this a step further. Bieber is shown at the beginning paying John Leguizamo on a street corner and asking him to make sure “she doesn’t get hurt.” We later find out that John was paid to orchestrate a kidnapping of both Justin and the woman whom he meets in a hotel room. Both are taken by men in masks, driven to a warehouse in the trunk of a car, and tied up. Justin is able to free them, but they are still in a room with their kidnappers. They back up to a door that leads outside the building and see that they are one of the top floors. Justin turns to the woman, holds out his hand and asks, “Do you trust me?” She takes his hand and they both jump out of the building. They jump and fall to the ground, landing on a parachute pillow only to discover that the whole thing was a trick. The kidnapping was actually orchestrated ruse to bring her to a party that they entered by leaping from the building away from the men who’d taken them. The men in masks all reveal themselves to be smiling beneath. She smiles at Justin, recognizing that it was all a trick, grabs his face, kisses him and they dance the night away in the underground club.

Even though the song is about feeling like a woman really can’t make up her mind about Justin, their relationship, and sexual intimacy, the woman in the video is not depicted this way at all. She appears sexually interested in Justin from the moment the two meet in the video and not bothered by his questions and demands at all. Though it is worth mentioning that he is terrorizing her in the name of romance, indeed the terror itself is a sign of how much he loves her—also a part of rape culture. This visual display alongside the lyrics works in ways that obscure the content of the lyrics, content that works against much of what we are shown visually.

Part of what makes rape culture so insidious is that violence against women is rendered pleasurable and even desirable. Thicke and Bieber’s songs are catchy, fun, and beg to be danced to. The women in Thicke’s video also appear to be having fun strutting around nude while the men sing. The woman in Bieber’s video is being kidnapped and terrified for sport, sure, but it’s because he wants to show his love for her. She’s shown realizing and appreciating this at the conclusion of the video. Rape culture hides the ways that sexual violence is enacted upon women’s bodies every day. It obscures the ways that men work to minimize women’s control over their own bodies. It conceals the ways that sexual violence stems not just from dangerous, deviant others, but the normal everydayness of heterosexual interactions. And all of this works to make sexualized power arrangements more challenging to identify as problematic, which is precisely what makes confronting rape culture so challenging.

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*See C.J. Pascoe and Jocelyn Hollander’s forthcoming work in Gender & Society—“Good Guys Don’t Rape: Gender, Domination, and Mobilizing Rape”—for more on what this discourse looks like and how it works.

If women can kiss women and still be straight, what about men?

Some scholars have argued that female sexual desires tend to be fluid and receptive, while men’s desires – regardless of whether men are gay or straight – tend to be inflexible and unchanging. Support for this notion permeates popular culture. There are countless examples of straight-identified female actresses and pop stars kissing or caressing other women – from Madonna and Britney to Iggy and J-Lo – with little concern about being perceived as lesbians. When the Christian pop star Katy Perry sang in 2008 that she kissed a girl and liked it, nobody seriously doubted her heterosexuality.

When Madonna and Britney Spears kissed during the 2003 Video Music Awards, no one suggested they were closeted lesbians. Win McNamee/Reuters

The story is different for men. The sexuality of straight men has long been understood by evolutionary biologists, and, subsequently, the general public, as subject to a visceral, nearly unstoppable impulse to reproduce with female partners. Consequently, when straight men do engage in same sex contact, these encounters are viewed as incompatible with the bio-evolutionary coding. It’s believed to signal an innate homosexual (or at least bisexual) orientation, and even just one known same-sex act can cast considerable doubt upon a man’s claim to heterosexuality. For instance, in 2007, Republican Senators Larry Craig and Bob Allen were both separately arrested on charges related to sex with men in public bathrooms. While both men remained married to their wives and tirelessly avowed their heterosexuality, the press skewered them as closeted hypocrites.

Despite the common belief in the rigidity of male heterosexuality, historians and sociologists have created a substantial body of well-documented evidence showing straight men – not “closeted” gay men – engaging in sexual contact with other men. In many parts of the United States prior to the 1950s, the gay/straight binary distinguished effeminate men (or “fairies”) and masculine men (“normal” men) – not whether or not a man engaged in homosexual sex. Historian George Chauncey’s study of gay life in New York City from 1890-1940 revealed that through much of the first half of the 20th century, normal (i.e., “straight”) working class men mixed with fairies in the saloons and tenements that were central to the lives of working men.

Close quarters: sexual encounters between men and ‘fairies’ were commonplace in the dense neighborhoods of working class Manhattan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jacob Riis

With sex-segregation the general rule for single men and women in the early 1900s, the private back rooms of saloons were often sites of sexual activity between normal men and fairies, with the latter perceived as a kind of intermediate sex – a reasonable alternative to female prostitutes. Public parks and restrooms were also common sites for sexual interaction between straight men and fairies. In such encounters, the fairy acted as the sole embodiment of queerness, the figures with whom normal (straight) men could have sex – just as they might with female sex workers. Fairies affirmed, rather than threatened, the heteromasculinity of straight men by embodying its opposite.

The notion that homosexual activity was not “gay” when undertaken by “real” (i.e. straight) men continued into the 1950s and 60s. During this period, the homosexual contact of straight men began to undergo a transformation from relatively mundane behavior to the bold behavior of male rebels. The American biker gang The Hells Angels, which formed in 1948, serves as a rich example. There are few figures more “macho” than a heavily tattooed, leather-clad biker, whose heterosexuality was as much on display as his masculinity. Brawling over women, exhibiting women on the back of bikes, and brandishing tattoos and patches of women were all central to the subculture of the gang.

Deep kissing was an expression of brotherhood among Hells Angels gang members. thisisthewhat

Yet as the journalist Hunter S. Thompson documented in his 1966 book Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, gang members also had sexual encounters with one another. One of their favorite “stunts” was to deeply French kiss one another – with tongues extended out of their mouths in a type of tongue-licking kiss often reserved for girl-on-girl porn. Members of the Hells Angels explained that the kissing was a defiant stunt that produced among onlookers the desired degree of shock. To them, it was also an expression of “brotherhood.”

Today, sexual encounters between straight-identified men take new but similarly “manly” forms. For instance, when men undergo hazing in college fraternities and in the military, there’s often a degree of sexual contact. It’s often dismissed as a joke, game, or ritual that has no bearing on the heterosexual constitution of the participants. As I document in my new book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, fraternity hazing has included practices such as the “elephant walk,” in which pledges are required to strip naked and stand in a circle, with one thumb in their mouth and the other in the anus of the pledge in front of them.

Similarly, according to anthropological accounts of the Navy’s longstanding “Crossing the Line” initiation ceremony, new sailors crossing the equator for the first time have garbage and rotten food shoved into their anuses by older sailors. They’re also required to retrieve objects from one another’s anuses.

One relatively recent example of the pervasiveness of these kinds of encounters between straight men was revealed in a report by the US-based watchdog organization Project on Government Oversight. In 2009, the group released photos of American security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul engaging in “deviant” after-hours pool parties. The photos show the men drunkenly urinating on each other, licking each other’s nipples, and taking vodka shots and eating potato chips out of each other’s butts.

Individuals often react to these examples in one of two ways. Either they jump to the conclusion that any straight-identified man who engages in sexual contact with another man must actually be gay or bisexual, or they dismiss the behavior as not actually sexual. Rather, they interpret it as an expression of dominance, a desire to humiliate, or some other ostensibly “non sexual” male impulse.

But these responses merely reveal our culture’s preconceived notions about men’s sexuality. Look at it from the other side of the coin: if straight young women, such as sorority pledges, were touching each other’s vaginas during an initiation ritual or taking shots from each other’s butts, commentators would almost certainly imagine these acts as sexual in some way (and not exclusively about women’s need to dominate, for instance). Straight women are also given considerable leeway to have occasional sexual contact with women without the presumption that they are actually lesbians. In other words, same-sex contact among straight men and women is interpreted through the lens of some well-worn gender stereotypes. But these stereotypes don’t hold up when we examine the range of straight men’s sexual encounters with other men.

It’s clear that straight men and women come into intimate contact with one another in a range of different ways. But this is less about hard-wired gender differences and more about broader cultural norms dictating how men and women are allowed to behave with people of the same sex. Instead of clinging to the notion that men’s sexuality is fundamentally inflexible, we should view male heterosexuality for what it is – a fluid set of desires that are constrained less by biology than by prevailing gender norms.

[Republished from The Conversation, February 2, 2015]

As a sociologist, I should hate football. It’s known to be a dangerous sport with long-term damaging effects to brains and bodies. In fact, here is a sociological analysis of how masculinity hurts men (and their bodies) via Football. No doubt, within football, there are many systems of inequalities operating—including but not limited to race, economics, prestige, worker’s rights, and I could go on. However, I grew up under the Friday night lights of Texas and have always lived in big football towns. As such, I also get why it can be treated as a religion.

Sociologically, the game, the business, and all of the dynamics and decision-making that surround the players and the league are fascinating. I especially like the behind the scenes coverage of football. But mostly, I like learning about the art and physics of the game—the bodies in motion and their comportment (here is one of my favorite clips on the precision of passing—which I highly recommend for use in classes during discussions of reliability and validity jic). I bring this up here particularly because overall I find football quite queer.

Football is a masculine paradox. Initially it may seem explosive, rock hard, and even violent, but in slow motion it appears graceful and fluid. The men involved are quite emotional and even moody at times—terms we wouldn’t typically associate with masculinity. But here we revere men’s passion for the game and tears at a loss, or win for that matter. In America, football is often portrayed as the epitome of masculinity. It is a hyper-masculinity that is actually quite over the top, at the same time football can also be very campy (especially when players have to be very precise and flexible with their bodies and as related to their emotions).

My favorite position is the tight end.

Based on the male-to-male touching, the language used, and the athletic bodies, many innuendos and out right claims have been made related to its homoeroticism. I am not the first to note this—just Google “homoerotic” and “football” for further evidence. It has been associated with “ritual homosexuality” and one article I ran across even referred to Football as “America’s Gayest Pastime.”

Draft Watch

Last week(end) was the NFL draft and in honor of all paradoxes, I thought I would share my three favorite masculine moments in the draft. They involve three players in particular—Mike Evans, Johnny Manziel, and Michael Sam. (Sociologically, Jadeveon Clowney’s 2014 NFL Draft Promo also caught my eye with him running shirtless through rain attacking football tackling dummies set to a thunderstorm and animalistic breath sounds—but that is a whole different blog in itself).

Disrupting the Backfield

#1. I will begin with Sam the most mundane and also most extraordinary. Upon getting his phone call and being drafted in the last day in the 8^th to last spot, he shares a kiss felt around the (football) nation with his male partner (click Sam above and scroll down to see the kiss). The kiss was on the lips and very short by all definitions and closed mouth—a first male same-sex kiss for the professional league, and perhaps for ESPN coverage. Sam is the first openly gay player to be selected in a draft and if he makes the team he will be the first out professional football player.

To ESPN’s credit, they treated Sam in that moment like they did any and all other athletes. Since Sam is gay, this is actually a huge deal. Sam became by far the most visible 7^th rounder pick and controversial in the league and has since received a great deal of coverage due to his sexual orientation and sadly backlash from the kiss. Media is still discussing this topic one week later. Much of the concern stemming from the backlash was for the children who might be watching and how they will be affected, in addition to what this will mean for the men in the locker room, and that there is just no place for kissing in football. The homophobic narratives and symbolic language are actually quite interesting—the idea that men that represent “true” masculinity and are the king of warrior kings within our society would be scared of one man in the locker room. However, as academics we know that “locker room” is code talked about as referring to team cohesion in narratives, but in reality means place where we are naked and vulnerable.

There have also been some great spoofs that have come to Sam’s defense or played on the for the sake of children narratives—you should check them out. Here is my favorite to which my friend and colleague Cate Taylor said it best with: “It had to be done.” This one is particularly great because it highlights how much kissing is a part of the football backdrop, and supports the traditional masculinity of the player image. I also really enjoyed the play on the concern “for the children” that twitter took on here.

#2. Mike Evans is drafted. Surrounded by his family, agents, and friends at the draft he reaches for his daughter and kisses and hugs her upon registering the news. He also appears to get quite choked-up which is understandable, as he has just achieved a lifetime goal. He tries to avoid the camera with his eyes and is checked on by multiple other men as to if he is alright. I love this masculine moment. We see men showing their emotions, being nurturing, and supporting one another in ways that outside of the context of sport could be argued as quite feminine.

Here is a link to someone’s recording of this moment, however, I could not find the actual footage of this on youtube and I have been looking for it for four days now. So this is the best we have. There is footage of most of the other top players selected hearing their news and walking up. I don’t know if this means anything…although I usually find the absence of such things just as insightful.

#3 Johnny Football comforts Mike Evans. In the same clip, we see Evans and Johnny Football embrace. It is a longer and intimate embrace—one of brothers. I like this moment. It’s the embrace that is typically only seen as ok between male family members in times of grief and extreme pride…and as we know in sport. Otherwise, it might be deemed gay and thus is just not done if you are a masculine dude.

In all of the above cases, we see men showing affection and supporting one another in a way that is generally considered atypical outside of the context of sports. Outside of the context of sports and family, these moments would not go along with the traditional masculine narrative. Yet within the sports framework, and in some of the most masculine spheres, these behaviors are frequent and understandable. Not feminine, nor gay at all.

Guest post by Amy L. Stone

This is not what I expected.

I’m standing on the streets of downtown Lafayette, a small city of about 120,000 people in Southern Louisiana in the heart of Acadiana, or Cajun country. I’m in the middle of a research project on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) visibility and incorporation into Mardi Gras throughout the Gulf South. I’ve intentionally avoided New Orleans and instead am looking at visibility and incorporation into Mardi Gras in smaller cities throughout the Gulf South like Mobile, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette.

At the moment, I’m mainly freezing, waiting outside in the March cold for a night parade to start. Along the barricades set up in downtown Lafayette are families with kids, senior citizens, young men and women. I’m standing between an older white couple and three drunk men with matted hair and flannel shirts. The parade begins late and includes a series of high school marching bands and parade floats organized by krewes, or private Mardi Gras societies. The parade floats are all double-decker floats with krewe members throwing beads, stuffed animals, and toys out to people along the route. At the end of the twenty-two floats comes the Mystick Krewe of Apollo de Lafayette, a racially inclusive gay men’s krewe that has run an annual Mardi Gras masque ball in Lafayette since 1976.

At first when I found out that Apollo was going to be at the end of the parade, I wondered if it signaled their marginalization within the parade, relegated to the back of the bus. Instead, as they turn the corner, I realize they are the grand finale. The crowd around me goes wild, the kids screaming and jumping up and down when they hear the music pounding off of Apollo’s float. Apollo floats include two floodlights searching the skies, and the head of the first float is Captain Apollo, the krewe ball captain decked out in LED-lit costuming from head to foot. The king and queen of Apollo are dressed in royal garb, sashes, and tiaras, with the queen done up in elegant drag. The krewe members on the float throw out beads of all colors, including specially colored rainbow beads. The last float of the parade has four distinct Pride flags, including one modeled after the American flag, draped off the end of it.

My first thought was “it’s a gay bar on a float.”

My second thought was “how is this happening in Lafayette?”

Earlier this week I had been reading about the ongoing issues with queer visibility in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston, particularly concerns over explicitly queer symbols like Pride flags. Indeed, there’s a long history of animosity over queer inclusion in St. Patrick’s Day parades in Boston and New York City. Yet here I am in Lafayette, where gay men’s visibility in the parade, including Pride flags and drag, seems to be relatively unproblematic. In fact, Apollo seems to have a more developed gay parading tradition than krewes in New Orleans, where no openly queer krewe parades. Throughout the Gulf South, krewes like Apollo are incorporated into Mardi Gras traditions and often celebrated as producing the best masque balls in town. At these balls, queer relationships, cross-dressing, creativity, and social relations are on display for thousands of ball attendees.

I become acutely aware that my puzzlement over why this parade is happening has a lot to do with my own assumptions about queer progress and geography. I assumed that clearly queer visibility in a city like Lafayette would be significantly less than in Boston or New York City, based on the lack of LGBT political rights in the city and understandings of Southern queer repression.

However, spending my sabbatical studying Mardi Gras in the Gulf South made me acutely aware of the assumptions that many scholars bring to research outside of the queer center. I think of the queer center as queer life in major cities like New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles or well-known queer havens like Key West. These cities are often studied as if there is something generalizable about queer life in them. I wonder if most LGBT scholars study the queer center because of their personal comfort level or because of assumptions that cities like Lafayette will some day in the distant future have the same LGBT tolerance, visibility, cultural forms, activism, legal rights, or public opinions that currently exist in, say, Chicago.

I sense a modernist teleological assumption in discussions about queer life in the South. I’ve had multiple people describe cities like Lafayette or Mobile as being “twenty years behind” the rest of the country, an understanding that is echoed in media reports on the South. This presumes that there’s some trajectory of queer acceptance that happens everywhere in the same way. It reminds me of a modernist division of countries into undeveloped, developing and developed nations, which assumes that developing nations will, of course, eventually become properly and fully developed.

These assumptions are corrected by the complex research on the queer South and on rural queer life. I’ve been thinking a lot about work by scholars like John Howard, E. Patrick Johnson, and Brock Thompson on gay and lesbian life in the South. In his book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, Johnson argues that queer life in the South is often “hidden in plain sight”, as unusual public spaces may be created for same-sex desire and culture. Scholars like Mary Gray and Emily Kazyak studying rural queer life also emphasize that rural cultural spaces are different. In her Gender &Society article on rural lesbians in the Midwest, Kazyak argues that rural spaces may be conducive to lesbian culture, particularly female masculinity.

I wonder if our analysis of queer visibility and acceptance needs to be refined even further to consider these smaller public spaces, the way queer visibility seems to be easily incorporated into a Mardi Gras parade in Lafayette yet is difficult to reconcile with the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Boston. That rather than a clear notion of queer progress, we understand the contingent, relational, and specific nature of queer visibility.

By: Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe

Originally posted at Girl w/Pen!

Coco Layne got a haircut.  She shaved both sides of her head, but left the top at a length that falls roughly to the bottom of her face.  As a feminist fashion, art, and lifestyle blogger, she was quick to recognize the ways that she could subtly re-style her hair and dramatically alter her presentation of gender (here).   So, in classic feminist art blogger style, she produced an art project depicting her experience.  Coco’s project—“Warpaint”—comes on the heels of several other photographic projects dealing critically with gender: JJ Levine’s series of photographs—“Alone Time”—depicting one person posing as both a man and a woman in a single photograph (digitally altered to include both images); the media frenzy over Casey Legler, a woman who garnered attention, recognition and contracts modeling as a man; the Japanese lingerie company that recently went viral by using a man’s body to sell a push-up bra, just to name a few.

Along with these other photographic projects on gender, Warpaint is critical commentary on what gender is, where it comes from, how flexible it is, what this flexibility means, and what gender (non)conformity has to do with sexuality.  Coco’s work provides important lessons about how gender is produced just below the radar of most people most of the time.  These projects all point out the extensive work that goes into doing gender in a way that is recognizable by others. Indeed, recognition by others is key to doing gender “correctly.” It is what scholar Judith Butler calls performativity or the way in which people are compelled to engage in a identifiably gendered performance. When people fail to do this, Butler argues that they are abject, not culturally decipherable and thus subject to all sorts of social sanctions. Butler points out that the performance of gender itself produces a belief that something, someone, or some authentic, inalienable gendered self lies behind the performance.  These photographic projects lay bear the fiction that there is this sort of inevitably gendered self behind the performance of gender.  This is precisely why these projects produce such discussion and, for some, discomfort.  It makes (some of) us uncomfortable by challenging our investments in and folk theories surrounding certain ways of thinking about gender and sexuality.

Much of the commentary the Warpaint project focused on Coco’s ability to get a retail job when she displayed her body in ways depicted on the bottom row.  Indeed her experience reflects research indicates that different workplaces reward particular gender appearances and practices. Kristen Schilt’s research on transmen at work, for instance, highlights the way that performances of masculinity get translated into workplace acceptance for these men. Yet doing gender in a way that calls into question its naturalness can put people (including those who do not identify as gender queer or tans) at risk. In Jespersen v Harrah, the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals held that female employees can be required to wear makeup as a condition of employment (in a workplace where men are not required to wear it).  While recent decisions have been more favorable to trans identified employees, most states do not have employment law or school policies protecting gender non-conforming individuals.  Simply put, most states do not have laws addressing —to use Coco’s language—gender expression.

However, for Coco, Warpaint is not just a project highlighting workplace gender bias, it was also about queer visibility.  Coco identifies as a queer femme woman.  On a typical day, she claims to fall somewhere on the third of fourth row of the set of images here. She artistically explores the ways that subtle changes in hairstyle, makeup, and clothing cause dramatic transformations in how others perceive her.  And while Coco’s more “femme” presentations helped her get a job, she also discusses the ways that those same presentations of her body worked against queer visibility.  As Coco put it: “I struggle with femme visibility and find it a little challenging to have the queer community recognize me to be ‘as queer as they are’ because of how femme I look sometimes” (here).

While gender identity and performance and sexual identity are not the same, gendered practices and presentations also signal membership in sexual communities, as Coco points out.  Often gender nonconformity is socially interpreted as a declaration of gay identity.  And, conversely, gender conformity is often “read” as straight.  So, gender conforming gay men and women and gender nonconforming straight men and women might struggle with visibility.  Mignon Moore’s research on Black lesbian communities addresses a similar set of struggles with gender expression and queer visibility.  Moore finds that the gender performances of the women she studied were strongly associated with sexual desires as her participants discussed finding gender expressions that elicited recognition and attention from desired audiences.  Moore’s research is concerned with these women’s experiences in spaces where queer recognition is desired and provides them with status and a sense of community and belonging.   However, queer visibility—as Coco addresses as well—affords a different set of consequences in different kinds of contexts.

As Coco highlights, the movement between masculinity and femininity, as well as the grey area in between, can be accomplished regardless of the sex of one’s body. The story of Warpaint is not just artistic; it is also about the way that gendered performances signify belonging to (or being excluded from) a community.

Guest post by Russian sociologist, Asya Tsaturyan.

Can a homophobic government create a homophobic populace?

In June 2013 the Russian Parliament (Duma) passed, and President Vladimir Putin signed into law, a bill that prohibits ‘homosexual propaganda’ directed at minors. Putin also signed legislation that forbids adoptions by same-sex couples or single people from countries where same-sex marriage is legal. During the current legislative session the parliament was going to vote on a bill that would empower the state to remove children from parents known to be or suspected of being homosexual, but moved to spring based on a technicality (See story here). In July 2013, Levada-Center, the country’s only independent public opinion research organization, conducted a survey focused on Russians attitudes toward LGBT issues that revealed 76% of those polled support the law prohibiting ‘homosexual propaganda’. The government has been citing these figures to justify an agenda of even more aggressive and comprehensive anti-gay legislation (See story here).

But did Russians always espouse such homophobic sentiment? While Russian conservatism is well documented, as is widespread apprehension about the influence of Western culture in Russia, is suppression of LGBT rights a pressing, general public issue that the government is responding to? Has a pro-gay agenda been “imposed” from outside, influenced by progressive developments in the West? As it turns out, gay rights have never been a populist concern. They appear as orchestrated state initiative to challenge minority rights. These laws have been deployed as a tactic to reinforce a social “order,” in support of an authoritarian regime. What follows is an analysis of how “mobilization” operated in Soviet Russia, an examination of current statistics on homophobia, and discussion explaining the State’s new homophobic agenda and its relationship to the grassroots protest movement.

In his theory of Homo Soveticus, Soviet-Russian sociologist Yuri Levada postulated that Russian public opinion is mainly a reflection of the normative position imposed by the government. Unity of mindset, he argued, can result from political mobilization carried out by the government that focuses on a never-ending struggle with external and internal enemies of the Soviet regime. As in the past, today, such measures are invoked to reinforce support for and the stability of Putin’s administration. A psychologically aggressive social atmosphere results and in turn impacts, a decrease in the diversity of public opinion and decrease in the value of any individual position. Following this theorem it is not surprising, as data confirms, Russians by large have not actively thought about LGBT rights. Their image of the “homosexual lifestyle” issignificantly influenced by state-controlled TV (88% of the population use federal TV channels as their primary source of information (See this). Russian homophobia seems not stem from a deep fear, suspicion or hatred of gays, but instead, as a manifestation of passive alignment with the government. Looking at the data, we can see, that before the homophobic policy has appeared, LGBT theme was not a matter of awareness nor concern for the majority of Russians. Almost 80% of respondents reported that they are not acquainted with any gay, lesbian or bisexual person (See this), suggesting that for the majority of the population, LGBT issues are remote and an abstract concept.

For almost 20 years the Levada Center has been asking Russians, “Which of the problems in our society concern you the most?” This is a partially categorized question that is posed twice a year to a representative sample of the urban and rural population in Russia of 1600 people aged 18 years and older in 130 localities in 45 different regions of the country. The margin of error in these studies does not exceed 3.4%. During this period, the rights of gays and lesbians has never been among the top 20 concerns for Russians. The last time the question was asked was in August 2013. Apprehensiveness about homosexual rights failed to make the list of 20 top fears, despite that this poll was conducted almost a year into the government’s anti-gay legislative campaign. Russians remain mostly anxious about high prices for goods and services, corruption and criminal activity, in line with polls from prior years. It also worth noting that Russians have virtually no fear of “contamination.” The question that was asked in the survey in May 2013 “Do you think your sexual orientation could change under the influence of homosexual propaganda?” 85% of respondents said no. In other words, the vast majority of Russians believe they do not know any gay or lesbian people and believe that they personally cannot be affected by “homosexual propaganda.” Evidently, the anti-gay legislation is also a kind of abstraction: the perpetrators of the crime of “homosexual propaganda” are imaginary, as are its victims.

Oddly, counter-intuitively, support for the anti-gay propaganda law is high, while support for the government as a whole, is at an all-time low. Indices of support for the government show a 20% decrease since 2008, and support for Vladimir Putin dropped from 78% in September 2008 to an all-time low of 27% in December 2012 and has stayed low since (The indices are constructed as the difference between positive and negative answers to the question: “Do you support Vladimir Putin”?), suggesting that the  Homo Soveticus type of thinking may be stronger than the discontent aimed at the government. This may sound paradoxical, but what follows may explain this effect.

So, what explains this contradictory sentiment? In winter 2011-2012 the biggest protests since the 1990s took place in Moscow. Authorities felt threatened, so anti-LGBT campaign was invented as a tool of a new mobilization strategy. This mobilization policy aimed to unify the conservative part of the society by casting LGBT rights as real threat to traditional Russian values, and moreover to identify and marginalize any tolerant and progressive opinions on this topic as corrosive to the body politic. This mobilization was characterized by a complete rejection of individual opinion in the public sphere. And it appears to be a successful strategy,s nice the vast majority of Russians support these homophobic laws. Throughout the 20th century, a primary goal of the Soviet government was to achieve and reinforce the conformity Yuri Levada identified as a key characteristic of Homo Soveticus. Then, as now, evidently the populace sustains a level of inertia that is stronger than any particular discontent with specific leaders or issues, yet vulnerable to fear-mongering. The question remains: if the state can product cultural homophobia, what social forces must be in place to remedy it?