Bodies, movements and desires: lesbian/gay subjectivity and the stereotype

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Notes

Rob Cover teaches media studies and new media at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include queer theory, media reception and identity performativity and the emerging field of electronic gaming. Correspondence to: [email protected]

I will note here that we can be compelled to perform sexuality as bisexual, which while on the one hand it disrupts the hetero/homo binary by presenting a middle ground, on the other it reinforces the binary by its reduction of two ‘positions’ into one, thereby intensifying the positions. More importantly, bisexuality fortifies traditional codes of ‘gender’ as the primary object of sexual choice, in presenting the possibility of attraction to two genders (but no more), thus implicated in what Butler refers to as the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990, p. 12) which upholds significations of gender and sexuality. In that sense, I am unwilling to view bisexuality as illegitimate and incoherent, for it is firmly implicated within the ‘authorized’ dichotomy of sexual choices.

It might be said that the biological essentialist myth of a bodily located root ‘cause’ of homosexuality is not altogether so recent an idea—Magnus Hirschfeld's late nineteenth‐century notion of a ‘third sex’ description of homosexuals is not dissimilar from the gay gene theory. Influenced by early sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Hirschfeld believed that homosexuality could be determined by examining other physical attributes such as the size of the hips (Miller, 1995, p. 113). Interestingly, Hirschfeld believed that male homosexuals had wider hips than heterosexual men. This is contrary to the more recent stereotype which, as Michael Bronski points out, involves gay men having slimmer hips (Bronski, 1984, p. 170).

The advertisement is featured on the Commercial Closet Website, which categorizes and archives ostensible and implicit lesbian/gay imagery in advertising (http://www2.commercialcloset.org/cgi‐bin/iowa/portrayals.html?record=975).

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Rob Cover

Rob Cover teaches media studies and new media at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include queer theory, media reception and identity performativity and the emerging field of electronic gaming. Correspondence to: [email protected]