But do not identify as gay

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Boellstorff, T. (2010) But do not identify as gay: The lives of "MSM".

Contents

Intro

MSM

  • Primarily known in HIV prevention, AIDS treatment
  • "New subject position", "mode of everyday self-identification"
    • Re: Foucault, "genealogical" understanding of discourses
    • Re: "Complicity of social scientists and social theorists in producing the objects they are investigating"
  • "Largely supplanting "gay" and "homosexual"" in HIV/AIDS activist, public heath, global (1)

Origins of MSM category

  • No definitive history yet exists (2)
  • "A scientific or bureaucratic coinage"
  • Signifying "behavior without identity"
  • Coinciding with rise of global internet access, circulation of PDFs (2)
  • First appearing in 1988 (3)

MSM w/r/t whiteness

  • 80s activists working in communities of color in US made qualifiers such as "latino gay men"
    • Not significant use of "MSM"
  • Outside of "Western" context, there may not be a local analogue for "gay"
    • Cannot assume "gay" subjectivity from behavior
    • Yet not significant use of "MSM" outside of HIV/AIDS work until early 2000s

MSM w/r/t health

  • Concern that non-gay-identifying men were not reached by gay-focused HIV/AIDS outreach
  • "MSM" is an "etic term" (4)
    • A "bureaucratized reverse discourse consciously opposed" to "gay"

4 MSM "isomorphisms" (4)

  1. Identity/behavior
  2. Western/non-Western
  3. Elite/working class
  4. White/non-white

Double-edged productivity of MSM

  • Drew attention to neglected communities but left no conceptual space for (5)
    • Men of color in US who identify as "gay"
    • Men outside of the "West" who identify as "gay"
  • MSM effective solidified "gay" as a reference to Western/white.
  • Reifies "men" and "sex" as "prediscursive" (5)
    • Men, biological
    • Sex, anal/penile penetrative intercourse

"Men who have sex with men (but do not identify as gay)"

Three ways the "but" persists implicitly

  1. If you're self-identifying as "gay", you're not "MSM"
  2. Suggests behavior without identity, men who "do not identify" at all (5)
  3. Suggests "MSM" is "innocent" of oppressive discursive categories (whiteness, Western, etc)

MSM instability over time

Transformation of enumeration

  • Initally "MSM" and "gay" were exclusive categories
  • Now "gay" is subsumed by umbrella "MSM" (6)
  • How to MTF trans people fit into this category?
  • If concern is over penetrative anal-penile sex, where does one bound MSM?
    • Who is forced into the category of (M)en?
    • Attempts to transform "men" into "male" to solve this turns back to biological/natural discourses
  • Categorization is a dead end
    • Leading to unwieldy terms like LGBTIQQ and MSM MTF TG (8)

Transformation of identity, behavior

  • Historically, impossible to categories of "behavior without identity"
    • e.g., "homosexual" (8)

Three steps in this transformation

  1. Move from individual to group
  2. Reframing "risk group" as "actually-existing community" rather than "epidemiological conceit"
  3. Thus, ppl in this community must have "MSM" identity (9)

New problems, new solutions?

  • Problem: Concern that some ppl might not respond to "MSM" identity
    • Of course this is exactly what MSM was deployed to address
  • Problem: extending "closet" discourse to "MSM" (what does it mean to "come out" as MSM?) (10)

Transformation of translocalization, reterritorialization

  • "Worlding" of "gay" occurs thru mainstream news media, commercial pop media
  • "Worlding" of "MSM" primarily thru HIV/AIDS discourse
    • "grants, conferences, educational materials, technical assistance programs" (11)
  • This leads to "retroactive discovery" that a community is "MSM"
    • Why isn't concern over colonial implications of "gay" extended to circulation of "MSM"?

"MSM" in Indonesia

  • Not widely heard in 90s, but quick spread during 00s (12)
  • Indonesian bureaucracies using MSM alongside and inclusive with "gay" and "waria"(~MTF) terms
    • "an incitement to discourse" (13)
  • Warias see themselves as "different" from MSM, they are "men with a woman's soul" (14)
    • To exclude from MSM "conflates biological maleness with masculine gender presentation" (14)
  • Boellstoff has powerful examples from listservs and memos of the movement and transformation of primarily english terms through Indonesian grammar and vocabulary (13-15)

Future of "MSM"

"A term invented in the United States to speak of behavior is now a powerful tool for transnational organizing around identity and community." (16)
  • MSM will continue to spread
    • Comparatively greater funding and reach of HIV/AIDS organizations as compared with LGBT (15)
    • "MSM" enables discussion of sex in contexts where talking about sex is difficult
  • MSM might offer subject position and identity to some people who are alienated by gay identity/subjectivity and thus hard to organize or activate toward "self-actualization" or "social justice" (16)
  • MSM may still "act as a prohibition" against gay identity (16)
    • Reductionist, "deflects attention from social dimensions of sexuality" and local self-identification (16)
    • Can "deny the range" of "gay subjectivities worldwide" (16)
    • Imply that non-normative persons are "misled, sold out, contaminated, or inauthentic sexual subjects" (16)
  • Contributes to "medicalization and depoliticization of homosexuality" (16)
  • Anthropology of development shows how "ostensibly value-free, technocratic terminologies" enable "forms of modern social control" to be most "powerfully exercised" (17)

Why might a man see "gay" as stigmatizing?

"It is logically impossible to "socially" exclude a behavior: it is persons, social beings, who are socially excluded." (18)
  • MSM adoption does not address possibility that "homophobia and heterosexism make gay identification undesirable" (17)
    • How does MSM contribute to the "hiding" of certain persons, practices? (17)

Concluding thoughts

Yogyakarta Principles (2006), set of int'l guidelines re: human rights, sexual orientation, and gender identity:

Principle 3: "each person's self-defined sexual orientation and gender identity is integral to their personality and is one of the most basic aspects of self-determination, dignity, and freedom." (18)
  • Question is "how to move beyond logic of enumeration and a quixotic fantasy of segregating identity from hebehavior." (18)
  • "At stake is nothing less than an emerging global vision of sexual selfhood and social belonging." (18)
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