Gay men diapers
Some tried to point your ethnographic attention elsewhere. I'm not judging or joking but I can't get this question out of my mind. Both men identified as gay. It is, in part, this expectation that sustains their efficiency as means for disciplining desire.
I recently informed by a close gay friend (bottom) that after doing the proverbial deed, gay men often wear diapers due to leakage. Juliana Friend: You mention that some of your Kenyan interlocutors gay skeptical about your choice to research discourses about diapers.
They began laughing profusely. The critical question for me then should not concern that one looks at a particular undignified thing, but how and why one does so. So, at the end of our conversation, we agreed that such rumors do require careful attention precisely because they are oppressive.
Cite As: Friend, Juliana. By recognizing that this practice holds meaning beyond mere fashion statements or kinks, we open up valuable dialogues about identity and acceptance. Share your videos with friends, family, and the world. Objects such as men might appear trivial to the violent politics of homophobia.
Conclusion The myriad reasons why gay men might choose to wear diapers encompass a vast spectrum of psychological, emotional, and sociocultural considerations. In other words, at particular moments in diaper, such objects facilitate the displacement of desires, fears, and anxieties over the changing meanings of work, wealth, the body, and kinship, and mobilize them in opposition to, say, the homosexual.
(serious) This seems like the right place to ask. So, it is important to experiment with modes of writing and analysis that foreclose such potential Othering effects and sensationalist imaginaries, while attending very seriously to how autochthonous utopias of a national hetero sexuality are currently produced.
George Paul Meiu: I remember vividly talking with two public health workers inin Mtwapa, Kenya. Ultimately, Meiu encourages us to expand our understanding of belonging and exclusion by attending closely to objects that, at first glance, may not seem to warrant close attention.
In fact, they later shared many such rumors with me. I could, of course, give you a whole list of objects I explore in my book, but, without some explanation for each, that list would not make much sense. I am exploring these kinds of objects in a recent article in American Anthropologist Meiu JF: There is such a rich, longstanding body of anthropological scholarship on secrecy and concealment in Africa.
Typically the sub wears : It's a place for the diaper curious to explore, meet other AB/DLs, Daddies and Diaper Boys, Diaper Pups, Baby Furs and more
This decentering lends insight into the reification of homo sexuality as a politically potent force for establishing and reinforcing the contours of citizenship. Quite the contrary: their poetic deployment in rumor and political rhetoric informs the construction of the homosexual body as a target of repudiation.
Rumors about diapers, of all things. How did you respond to these reactions?
After all, the two public health workers I talked to that day were themselves working hard to educate the local population about MSM issues. And so, to make the homosexual body a more stable target of outrage and violence in the collective imagination, leaders, media, civil society groups, and citizens often deploy a vast set of unlikely objects.
To be sure, a sensationalizing focus on objects such as diapers may easily undermine a politics of respectability that seeks to counter older colonial paradigms of racialized sexuality, a risk I take very seriously. So, instead, let me offer just one other example of such queer objects: plastics.
And, along the way, we had also enjoyed a good laugh. Do gay men really wear diapers? It is important to remember that the reification of any normative framework—say, of intimate citizenship, for example—depends on and is constituted by the things it disavows as shameful, unserious, or perverse.
They were laughing so hard that I started laughing with them.