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Corporeal Controls

Violence, Bodies, and Young Gay Men's Identities

BeLonG To Youth Project, Dublin, Ireland

Simon Bradford

Brunel University, Middlesex, England

This article explores the experiences of gay and bisexual young men in Ireland. It draws on focus groups and individual interviews with a group of gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 25 in Dublin. The article explores how their identities are "discredited" and "othered" through symbolic and material violence, and their bodies become an index in both maintaining and transgressing normative masculine identities. Gay and bisexual young men are stigmatized (by others and self), particularly in school and through sport, by an ascribed femininity in their body practices, and they resist this by employing survival strategies and by recreating their identities through diverse and deliberate presentations of their bodies. The young men compared experiences at school and on the gay scene, the latter often providing them with positive and affirming experiences, although there was evidence that the gay body is subject to (negative) scrutiny on the scene as well.

Key Words: body • gay identity • young men

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