Gay men in diapers

George Paul Meiu: I remember vividly talking with two public health workers inin Mtwapa, Kenya. After all, the two public health workers I talked to that day were themselves working hard to educate the local population about MSM issues.

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. 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.

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. So, at the end of our conversation, we agreed that such rumors do require careful attention precisely because they are oppressive.

And, along the way, we had also enjoyed a good laugh. Objects such as diapers might appear trivial to the violent politics of homophobia. Juliana Friend: You mention that some of your Kenyan interlocutors were skeptical about your choice to research discourses about diapers.

In other words, at particular moments in time, 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.

Check out our gay boys in diapers selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our cloth diapers shops. They were laughing so hard that I started laughing with them. This decentering lends insight into the reification of homo sexuality as a politically potent force for establishing and reinforcing the contours of citizenship.

I recently informed by a close gay friend (bottom) that after doing the proverbial deed, gay men often wear diapers due to leakage.

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. 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.

Some tried to point your ethnographic attention elsewhere. (serious) This seems like the right place to ask. The critical question for me then should not concern that one looks at a particular undignified thing, but how and why one does so.

Both men identified as gay. Quite the contrary: their poetic deployment in rumor and political rhetoric informs the construction of the homosexual body as a target of repudiation. 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.

They began laughing profusely. In fact, they later shared many such rumors with me. It is, in part, this expectation that sustains their efficiency as means for disciplining desire. How did you respond to these reactions? I'm not judging or joking but I can't get this question out of my mind.

Rumors about diapers, of all things. Cite As: Friend, Juliana. Share your videos with friends, family, and the world.