Masculinities, Sexualities & Love

1. Masculinities, Sexualities & Love Dr Aliraza Javaid BSc (Hons), MSc, MRes, PhD. Email: ali_2p9@hotmail.co.uk Twitter: @Aliraza_Javaid

2. Masculinities, Sexualities & Love (Routledge)

3. Why write the book? • What is love? Why does love hurt so much when a significant other leaves us? Why does love matter to us? Is love even relevant in current society for gay and bisexual men? • The issue of love has been a heavily undertheorised topic in sociology. • Building on Ken Plummer’s work (1978): ‘Men in Love: Observations on Male Homosexual Couples’ • Personal reflexivity.

4. Aims of the book How do gay and bisexual men define, construct and conceptualise love? What does love mean to these men? How do notions and representations of romance and love shape men’s constructions and discourses of love? How do concepts around gender and sexuality interlink with romance and love? In what ways do men’s constructions and discourses of love influence and shape their sexual practices? What are the social and cultural implications of men’s certain constructions of love and sexual practices? What are the experiences of singlehood among men, and what are the implications of singlehood?

5. The Empirical Component Conducting interviews with 23 gay and bisexual men in the UK to understand how they construct love. I had a Grindr, Tinder, and POF profile. I continued to use these profiles when getting access to the men. I had identified as gay, which made it easier for the men to connect with me. The conversations lasted, approximately, anywhere from 1 hour to 5 hours during 2016/17 in England.

6. Key Findings • The gay and bisexual’s men’s romantic or sexual lives are shaped by social structures and structural constraints. • It is also clear that the men in my study are exercising considerable reflexivity and agency within negotiating their own romantic and sexual lives and their own relationships in given cultural and social structural contexts. • For some of the men, they had access to capital so this widened their sexual opportunities in that they were able to go to places in which to meet potential dating partners. They were able to have access to digital dating apps, in which to meet other men either for potential dates or for sleeping with them on a casual basis.

7. Doing Gender & Sexuality • Sexual, intimate and personal life are shaped by extensive social structures alongside being arranged by the intersection of gender and (hetero)sexuality. The ‘doing’ of sexuality and gender is moulded by social structures that operate to maintain them. • The men in my study ‘do’ heterosexuality, sexuality, or gender in two ways. Firstly, through discourses, and, secondly, this ‘doing’ of gender and sexuality is also via materiality, so through social practices, or “practices of intimacy” (Jamieson 2011).

8. Hegemonic Masculinities • In the context of love, at the local level, localized hegemonic masculinities are relevant because they are most commonly expressed in intimate relationships. • Sexual and physical violence often occur in toxic relationships, under certain social situations. Creating a ‘gender project’ in the way of violence constructs patterns of hegemonic masculinity. • However, at particular times, and in a fluid manner, hegemonic masculinities can be resisted in romantic relationships: ‘positive masculinities’ (see Messerschmidt, 2018).

9. Hybrid Masculinities as Concealed Hegemonic Masculinities • In the context of love, hybrid masculinities are relevant. They include a variety of subordinated performances and styles (feminine, masculine, or both) into privileged men’s identities within the procedure of obscuring and securing their access to privilege and power (Bridges, 2014; Bridges and Pascoe, 2014.) • Men expressing emotion, vulnerability and intimacy can be seen as, rather than contradictions to, expressions of hegemonic masculinity in relationships. Using love, performing it to the significant other, can operate to legitimate unequal gender and sexual relations. • For example, when one partner enacts hegemonic masculine practices, such as through sexual violence, the victim ‘consents’ to it only to please the perpetrator because of love. I stress: I make no victim-blaming assertions!

10. Discourses and Love • Two individuals in a romantic relationship might be influenced by cultural discourses of romantic love and intimacy, but they may have their own idiosyncratic understanding of what romance is for them. • We are not simply free to make and remake our sexual, gendered, and romantic lives just as we please because we are either restricted or freed by the interpersonal and cultural resources that we can access in social settings we are positioned in. These resources includes discourses.

11. Email: ali_2p9@hotmail.co.uk • Twitter: @Aliraza_Javaid Thank you.