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ItalianoA Construction of Leather: Aesthetics, Masculinity & Sexual Practice
| Introduction Gay leather culture has been around for a very long time, as the first starting strand appeared right after the end of world war II and the second strand appeared in the early 1950s (Ridinger, 2002). The leather culture draws upon many different things, from military social customs and motorcycle clubs as the two strands mentioned above (Ridinger, 2002), to the sexually explicit drawings of the artist Tom of Finland (Graham, 1998; Lahti, 1998). Gay leather culture is, to use a modern expression, very much ‘in your face’ with its blatant, sexually explicit and masculine nature. Gay leather culture has several times caused hostile reactions from both people within the lgbtqia+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and those in between or beyond) community, as well as from people outside the community (Graham, 1998). This is why I find it important to analyze some main aspects of the leather man, to uncover parts of why it causes reactions. As situated within the culture, I find that the aesthetics, masculinity and sexual practice is at the core of what ‘constructs’ the leather man. With aesthetics, masculinity and sexual practice as my main points of analysis, I draw upon theory on masculinity from Jeff Hearn (2015) and R. W. Connell (1992), Intersectionality from Hill Collins & Bilge (2016), a fraction from Goffman’s (1990) theory on presentation in everyday life, as well as subversive bodily acts and performativity from Judith Butler (1990), to give a description of these three core aspects of the leather man. This study is divided into four sections. The first section, the erotic aesthetics of leather, aims to first give a brief historical background of from where and how the leather culture emerged before switching to an analysis of the leather culture aesthetics. To be able to understand the aesthetics of modern day leather men there is a need to understand its origins and its influences to not get a distorted picture. The second section, A Hyper-masculine clone, or not? will give an analysis of the masculinity that is so highly praised in the gay leather culture. To understand this I turn to the ethnographic study of gay settings in the 1970s through Levine (Levine, 1998), as well as other studies on gay masculinity/hyper-masculinity and straight acting. The third section, the prejudice and stigma of leather sex, will have its focus on sexual practice. Though it’s not something practiced by all people within the community, leather culture has a close connection with sexual conduct falling within the spectra of BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) which is why it is an important part for analysis to understand the provocative nature of leather culture. In the fourth section I summarize the study and give my concluding remarks on the topic, as well as examples for further research on the area. Gay leather culture was not seen as a legitimate area of study for a long time (Ridinger, 2002), which is why there is much left to research on the topic. Section 1 – The erotic aesthetics of leather The gay leather community has its beginning in the first few years following the second world war, when soldiers returning to the US after the war brought the military attire and social customs back, and, in to their private lives. The exchange of military pins between friends who served together, became what we today see in the exchange of leather club insignias (the different club’s logotypes) (Rubin in Ridinger, 2002). The second strand from which the leather community took its form developed in the mid-1950s. This was a time when there was a rapidly increasing enthusiasm for motorcycle clubs, with the Satyrs of Los Angeles forming in 1954 (Ridinger, 2002). In the beginning of the 1950s, leather men started to form clubs or opened bars. The first leather club, called Shaw’s, opened in New York in 1951, and in 1957 the first European leather bar, called Argos, opened in Amsterdam. With the sheer number of bars opening they soon found a need for joint associations, then mostly in the form of biker clubs to side-step laws that prohibited homosexuality (Cioni, n.d.). During the second world war (roughly the same time as when the leather community started to emerge), the artist Tom of Finland started to draw pictures that would come to inspire many gay men. The drawings, depicting gay men in different settings, are explicitly sexual and pornographic. The men in Tom’s drawings are donned in leather, motorcycle gear, dressed as lumberjacks, sailors and in uniforms from other areas of work that includes manual labor, as an homage to the masculinity and body of the working-class man (Lahti, 1998). Looking at the setting, one can argue that Tom of Finland has been a part of this scene from the very beginning and thus being one among others who influenced the scene to be what it is today. In his study of Tom of Finland’s drawings, Lahti (1998) shows through a quote from an older interview with Tom of Finland, that these types of clothes and bodies is what turned him on. Mosher et. al. (2006) found through interviews that the garments of leather is very much eroticized by those who call themselves leather men, and as Tattelman (2005) says; “Gay men transform[ed] figures of working-class utility, exemplified by the leather man, biker, jock, cowboy, outlaw, soldier, policeman, and construction worker, into fetishistic caricatures (p. 301).” Tattelman says further on that putting on the “male drag” is a way of mocking the stereotype of gays being effeminate. Butler (1990) uses the concept of subversive bodily acts to describe drag and how it becomes an imitation without an original, through parody. Applying this to the context of putting on the “male drag” to mock the effeminate gay stereotype, means that it’s also a degrading of the female gender, in the sense that homosexual men has been seen as lacking masculinity and thus been degraded on the masculine “scale.” Butler bases her argument on Esther Newton (Newton in Butler, 1990) who says that “appearance is an illusion”, but takes it further and says that drag as an imitation of gender also exposes gender as an imitation. In that sense we find ourselves in a way of seeing the aesthetics of leather men, the male drag, as an illusion, or an imitation. If we see it as an imitation, then the hyper-masculine aesthetics becomes a performance of an imitated gender role. If then we see this through Goffman (1990), one could argue that the leather aesthetics is a front that leather men puts on when in the settings of a leather club or event. A gym built body will certainly still be there when the leather man then returns to a more relaxed setting, or backstage as Goffman says, but the other aesthetics will be put on a shelf until his next performance. Cause the performative nature of the clothing and demeanor, are typically confined to the settings of a club or other type of gay setting (Mosher et. al., 2006). The analogy of theatre that Goffman uses to explain how we perform or everyday lives coincides in a way with Butler’s (1990) theory of performativity, in which our unconsciously repetitive and performative acts is what creates our gender. Becoming a leather man is very much a process (Graham, 1998), in which we can find that repetitiveness of putting on this front becomes a key to build a “leather identity.” In the conclusion of his study, Tattelman (2005) states that “Gay men took the visual appearance of working-class masculinity, building their bodies, growing mustaches, and replicating a butch attitude. They reformulated the archetypal male to fit into the context of an urban gay male identity (p. 307).” The phrasing of his statement suggests that these men are of middle-class or above, that they didn’t have the built bodies or the clothes to fit with it, and that could probably be the case since middle-class men probably didn’t do much manual labor. When looking to what Levine (1998) writes about how the clothes had the looks of working-class attire, but were tailored to a perfect fit, also fits the notion of a middle-class man. And when turning to google for answers about how much leather clothes and accessories cost, the prices are quite high. One could argue that this is a pure appropriation of working-class utility, but it also raises a question whether it’s just a way of fetishizing the archetypal heterosexual masculinity? Even more so, this brings us in to the realm of an intersectional perspective of sexuality, gender and class. According to Hill Collins & Bilge (2016) intersectionality is a way of analyzing the complexity of people, and of the world. They describe that “that major axes of social divisions in a given society at a given time […] operate not as discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but build on each other and work together (p. 18).” They also show through examples how complex cases of discrimination or social injustice happens in the intersections between social divisions, such as gender, class, race and sexuality, where people find themselves unable to describe the discrimination at hand without addressing two or more categories. In this case we find ourselves within the area of social injustice, as an appropriation of class utility can’t be called discrimination, and whether the leather men’s use of working-class attire is a homage to the masculinity connected to it, if it’s just an erotization that turns it into fetishism, or both. According to Tattelman (2005), as quoted above, gay men turned working-class attire into “fetishistic caricatures,” something that is even more evident in what Lahti (1998) writes about the drawings of Tom of Finland, and about Tom himself saying that the working-class men were the ones turning him on. Within the question of class contempt or fetishizing, there’s also a question of gender, and fighting against the notion of gay men being effeminate. Could the appropriation of working-class attire also be a way of fighting against this stereotypic view of gay men as effeminate? The complexity of what could have been a simpler question of aesthetics becomes evident here, cause the question of what bodies that are represented is also at hand. Is it just bodies of middle-class men and above, or are bodies of working-class men represented, and what about people of color? To be able to show this one would have to do an empirical study on the subject, something not possible in the framework of this paper. Section 2 – A Hyper-masculine leather clothed clone, or not? In his book Gay Macho, Levine (1998) describes how men, before realizing they’re gay, are being fostered as heterosexual men with the stereotypical expectations that comes with being a man, in terms of behavior and heterosexual desire. This is also described by Connell (2005) in her study A very straight gay where all the gay men studied were brought up conventionally heterosexual. Levine (1998) further describes how homosexual men, before the liberation movement in the 1970s, were seen as failed men, and effeminate, which caused many of them to internalize that view. The liberation movement caused a shift in which gay men started to act more masculine, they found a new self-esteem. Levine writes that they “adopted manly attire and demeanor as a means of expressing their new sense of self (p. 28).” According Butler (1990) we can understand this as “compulsory heterosexuality”, where the norm is heterosexuality and everything deviant becomes incomprehensible in that specific (heterosexual) matrix. And since practice within that matrix thus becomes regulatory, the norm of heterosexuality becomes compulsory. The way Butlers shows how being gay is incomprehensible within a heterosexual matrix, becomes even more clear when seen through Connell’s (2005) view of how gay men by their mere existence, in a way, shatters the hegemony. She argues that this is the case since hegemonic masculinity, which she defines as “the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations (p. 76),” is solely heterosexual in a patriarchal society. We can through these views argue that Gay men, as men deviant from heterosexuality, shatters the picture of men and masculinity as hegemonic in how they subvert the male gender role, by not adhering to the compulsory heterosexuality and conventional masculinity that comes with what many would say is “being a man.” The leather culture is a place that in many ways celebrate a type of hyper-masculine ideal, even though Graham (1998) found that the more “conventional” hyper-masculine ideals are being replaced by other masculinities with younger gay men becoming a part of the culture. The hyper-masculinity is in some ways a real opposite to femininity (Childs, 2016), where the demeanor and attire of working-class manual labor together with leather can be said to be prominent factors. Even though this type of masculinity is so highly praised there’s few who try to live up to the ideal (Graham, 1998), and one of Childs’ (2016) respondents said that “part of being in the fetish/leather community is that you can create new categories that do not correspond to traditional categories.” In a study of gay masculinities in discourse, Ravenhill & De Visser (2016) found that the gym built bodies and participation on stereotypically masculine activities, could be used as a way of hiding one’s sexuality, and be perceived as heterosexual. The participants in the study also expressed that gay men in a sense is withdrawn from the pressure of being masculine, since gay men are seen as inherently feminine. Are gay leather men then choosing to be masculine? If seen through Goffman (1990) the case of leather men as very masculine could just be a front that the men put on not to “lose face”, or respect, by being seen as feminine. In this case it would be within the setting of the leather culture, since we’ve established that leather is mostly worn within specific settings. This should also be seen in regards of the hyper-masculine ideal within the culture since, as stated above, it’s being replaced by new masculinities through younger gay men entering the culture. But interestingly enough, the type of masculinity that clearly bases itself upon stereotypical heterosexual masculinity lives on, and draws, in a way, attention to hegemonic masculinity. Cause even though, as showed above through Connell (2005), gay men shatter hegemony through their mere existence, the masculinity that is worshiped by many and performed by some within the leather community, still reproduce the heterosexual hegemonic masculinity. Gay masculinity is a masculinity subordinated heterosexual masculinity (Connell, 2005), which becomes evident in the sense that gay men has been defined as lacking masculinity (Connell, 2005; Levine, 1998; Mosher et. al., 2006). So, with that notion in mind we can start to see that the masculine ways of the leather man almost try to go beyond the heterosexual masculinity, to break with the definition. And at the same time, it’s, in a sense, reproducing a hegemonic masculinity. The concept of hegemonic masculinity, in combination with the Americas as the leather culture’s place of origin, makes it interesting to bring up Hearn (2015) and his concept of transnationalization. Simply explained, Hearn uses his concept as a way of showing how the hegemony of men transgress borders. The concept becomes interesting in the way that it shows the hegemony of men, as Hearn calls it, isn’t confined to a certain nation. It transgresses nation borders and establishes hegemony on all levels of society. The leather culture originated in the United States (Ridinger, 2002) but has since spread across the global north (I haven’t found any notions of it being present in the global south, though the probability is quite high). The same has happened with the drawings of Tom of Finland. Tom was from Finland but his drawings are now known on a transnational level. Hearn (2015) also talks about the importance of information and communication technologies has in the continuous spreading of hegemony. And by taking Tom’s drawings as an example we can see this happen. When he started drawing after the cold war, the technologies for spreading media was obviously not as developed as they are now. But with the continuous development the drawings have been spread, and with that also helping in reproducing the view of masculinity, transnationally, that we see is praised in the leather community. The transnational phenomena that leather culture has become, is evident through street-fairs like Folsom Europe (http://folsomeurope.info) and other Folsom street events (https://www.folsomstreetevents.org) drawing people from all over the world. And the fact that the leather aesthetics and masculine demeanor seems cohesive on all these events, which can be seen in pictures on the event pages, shows even more of how a hegemonic masculine ideal has been transnationally established within the culture. Section 3 – Gay Leather men and sex The sexual practice within the gay leather culture can be said to have its focus on leathersex and BDSM (bondage, domination, submission, sadism, masochism). While leathersex revolves around the erotization of leather (Weinberg, 2006), BDSM has its focus on bondage, domination, submission, sadism and masochism. BDSM and leathersex intersect, but are two different things (Lieshout in Weinberg, 2006). There’s also an importance in stating that not all leather men are engaged in BDSM but the practices are indeed very connected to the community (Mosher et. al., 2006). During his ethnographic studies in the 1970s, Levine (1998) found that gay men engaged in BDSM because it was regarded as archetypically masculine, and entailed traits such as dominance, control and endurance. Even though the men in Levine’s study only engaged in lighter BDSM practices (practices that didn’t involve pain more intense than a light spanking), they engaged in it, and wore leather, so no one would get “the wrong idea” about them. These men were engaged in BDSM and leather sex to adhere to masculine norms and uphold their butch identities. This probably comes from them being scared of losing face and thus be humiliated in front of the crowd for which they’re performing (Goffman, 1990), meaning they act masculine/butch in order to avoid being exposed as inherently effeminate. This not to say that all were feminine, but to avoid the stereotypical way of society seeing gay men as effeminate. Since Levine’s studies took place in the 1970s, it serves as an interesting notion of how gay culture, both in general and leather in particular, came to be what it is today. And even though his studies don’t focus much on BDSM it shows gay men have engaged in BDSM at least since the gay liberation movement had its beginning. BDSM as a sexual practice, has been conflated with violence both within and outside academia (Williams, 2016), and one can argue that, in recent years, this became even more of a case when the movie Fifty shades of grey had its premier. BDSM draws the line between itself and violence with the importance of consent (Williams, 2016), which is non present in most cases in the movie. The debate around it shows in a way what the lack of knowledge can create. In this case the stigmatization of a lot of people involved in BDSM. Another interesting notion is the fact that BDSM is classified as a mental disorder in the DSM-IV-TR (and hasn’t been removed in the newer DSM-V (Kafka, 2010)), even though it doesn’t meet the criteria to be classified as one (Moser & Kleinplatz, 2005). Moser and Kleinplatz also argue that: All societies attempt to control the sexual behavior of their members. One mechanism of exercising this control is to define a specific sexual interest as pathognomonic for a mental disorder. Historically and cross culturally, even an accusation of interest in specific sexual practices could result in death, imprisonment, loss of civil rights, and other social sanctions. Similarly, being classified as mentally ill could result in death, imprisonment, loss of civil rights, and other social sanctions. Thus, the confounding of mental illness with unusual sexual desires is understandable (Moser & Kleinplatz, 2005, p. 92). In resemblance with this Foucault said that the connection between mental disorders and sexually deviant behaviors serves to get rid of deviant behaviors in favor for normative and reproductive behaviors (Foucault, 1978). So, the pathologization of BDSM and other paraphilias reproduce the stigma and taboo surrounding it. One could also say that this way of viewing BDSM as a mental disorder, as well as confusing it with sexual violence, creates a sexual hegemony, or, to borrow from and rework Butler (1990), a compulsory sexual normativity where everything deviant from that matrix becomes incomprehensible, and therefore confused with violence and viewed as a mental disorder. In her study of discourse around BDSM Williams (2016) found that the abbreviation S/M or S&M as well as BDSM is terms created within the community to move away from the violence-related term of Sadomasochism (even though most would argue that BDSM is the term used now both within academia and the community). She also mentions that the words “top” and “bottom” is used in a similar way within the leather community. The terms top and bottom suggests a power-relation between those engaged in BDSM. And looking at the abbreviation BDSM we can find the same thing, at least when talking about dominance and submission as well as sadism and masochism. BDSM is in many ways sexual pleasure through acts of power towards a recipient of those acts, where the recipient gets pleasure through submission. Foucault (1978) said that “Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement (p. 48),” something that becomes very evident here. Foucault brings this up in a discussion of how normativity categorizes and exercises power over bodies. In which he argues that it doesn’t prohibit the spread of “perversions” but fixates them within bodies. Since this is the case, then we can argue that the leather men’s sexual practice is yet another way to break with, and deviate themselves from normative perceptions of what sexual practice should be. And we could even argue that some leather men “[…] embrace leather culture’s radical sexual component precisely because they see it as challenging the predominant image of ‘respectable’ homosexuality (Graham, 1998, p. 168, my emphasis).” That challenge, that breaks with norms but aligns itself with the power/pleasure relationship, is another strand of what shatters compulsory sexual normativity. The concepts of “top” and “bottom” and the power-relation in between them, also adheres to masculinity and femininity. As the gay men in Ravenhill & De Vissers’ (2016) study says, being top always comes through as masculine and being bottom as feminine. The penetrator top as masculine, and the penetrated bottom as feminine. And in the same way the sadist as the man inflicting pain on the feminine masochist who receives the pain inflicted. Section 4 – Conclusion and areas for further research Gay leather culture is, to use a modern expression, very much ‘in your face’ with its blatant, sexually explicit and masculine nature. But beneath the blatantness lies a deeply complex nature of a subculture on the margins of the lgbtqia+ community. The three aspects of leather culture that I’ve analyzed in this paper, is merely a shallow shovel cut to lay bare the multiple strands from which the gay leather culture draws upon. But at the same time the analysis shows what could be seen as the core of what a leather identity is built upon. The aesthetics, masculinity and sexual practice forms a simple but cohesive picture from which we can begin to understand the leather culture and the leather man. Where it and he came from, the struggles on the margins and what seems to be a culture built on self-esteem, masculine behavior and a shared fetish interest. The three aspects analyzed intertwine and can’t be explained without the other, at least not in this case. The aesthetics draws upon the masculine features of working-class labor and utility (Graham, 1998; Lahti, 1998; Mosher et al., 2006; Tattelman, 2005), masculinity can be seen to convey itself through the aesthetics and sexual practice through the working-class masculinity and utility. In the same way, sexual practice draws upon fetishization of leather. through the aesthetics and typical masculine traits such as control, domination and endurance (Levine, 1998). The cumulation of these aspects break through taboos, normative behavior and both shatters and reproduce a masculine hegemony. The hostile reactions towards the culture, that I mentioned in the introduction, makes itself evident with this. The appropriative nature of the leather aesthetics shown through Tattelman (2005) among others, shows a complex duality of erotization and fetishization as one part, and whether it’s a pure appropriative and therefore degrading matter as the other part. This complex matter would by itself serve as a topic for in-depth intersectional analysis. Another area worth studying lies within the sexual practice of leather men. Even though this has been written about, most of the studies and analysis of sexual practice within leather culture seems to be situated in the beginning of the 2000s or earlier. Bibliography Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity. (2nd ed.). New York & London: Routledge. Childs, A. (2016). Hyper or hypo-masculine? Re-conceptualizing “hyper-masculinity” through Seattle’s gay, leather community. Gender, Place & Culture, 23(9), 1315–1328. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2016.1160033 Cioni, F. for leather club R. (n.d.). The Birth of ECMC. Retrieved September 27, 2017, from http://ecmc.nu/j-ecmc/index.php/ecmc/ecmc-history Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (Vol. 1). New York: Pantheon books. https://doi.org/10.2307/1904618 Goffman, E. (1990). The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin. https://doi.org/10.2307/258197 Graham, M. (1998). Identity, Place, and Erotic Community Within Gay Leather Culture in Stockholm. Journal of Homosexuality, 3545(9), 163–183. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v35n03_07 Hearn, J. (2015). Men of the world: genders, globalizations, transnational times. Los Angeles: SAGE publications. Hill Collins, P., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kafka, M. P. (2010). The DSM diagnostic criteria for paraphilia not otherwise specified. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39(2), 373–376. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-009-9552- 0 Lahti, M. (1998). Dressing up in power: Tom of Finland and gay male body politics. Journal of Homosexuality, 35(3–4), 185–205. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v35n03_08 Levine, M. P. (1998). Gay Macho: The life and death of the homosexual clone (1st ed.). New York and London: New York University press. Moser, C., & Kleinplatz, P. J. (2005). DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: And Argument for Removal. Journal Of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 17(3/4), 91–109. https://doi.org/10.1300/J056v17n03_05 Mosher, C. M., Levitt, H. M., & Manley, E. (2006). Layers of Leather: The Identity Formation of Leathermen as a Process of Transforming Meanings of Masculinity. Journal of Homosexuality, 51(3), 93–123. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v51n03 Ravenhill, J. P., & De Visser, R. O. (2016). “There Are Too Many Gay Categories Now”: Discursive Constructions of Gay Masculinity. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, (June). https://doi.org/10.1037/men0000057 Ridinger, R. B. M. (2002). Things visible and invisible: the Leather Archives and Museum. Journal of Homosexuality, 43(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v43n01_01 Tattelman, I. (2005). Staging sex and masculinity at the Mineshaft. Men and Masculinities, 7(3), 300–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X04272120 Weinberg, T. S. (2006). Sadomasochism and the Social Sciences: A Review of the Sociological and Social Psychological Literature. Journal of Homosexuality, 50(2/3), 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v50n02 Williams, J. (2016). Sadomasochism to BDSM: Discourse Across Disciplines. Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, 22(1), 67–84. |
Jag är en sån där akademiker. Den här är skriven i slutet av första delkursen av min masterutbildning ^^
Added 13 apr 2020 Articles
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