“No Bare Bottoms”: The Responsibilization of the Good Gay Citizen in Icelandic Media Discourses 1990–2010

ABSTRACT

This article explores how gay men in Iceland were constructed as good responsible citizens through neoliberal discourses from 1990 to 2010. Drawing on interviews with gay men in Icelandic magazines, we focus on three discursive formations of responsibilization that reveal the technologies of agency at play in transforming the men into good, responsible gay citizens capable of self-management. The discursive formations focus on the good gay citizen who (a) has a positive mind-set, (b) transforms himself, and (c) displaces responsibility for personal harm. They reveal how gay men are constituted as neoliberal subjects through discursive practices linked to responsibility, happiness, and national progress. These practices enable a normalization process devoid of confrontation, anger, or blame where gay men are not only made responsible for their own lives but also the marginalization they experienced in the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Homosexuality
• historical discourse analysis
• neoliberal governmentality
• happiness
• responsibilization
• media discourses
• nation

Acknowledgments

We extend our heartfelt thanks to our peer reviewers for their insightful suggestions, which contributed greatly to the article. We would especially like to thank our colleagues in the Sexual Outlaws research project, Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir and Hafdís Erla Hafsteinsdóttir, for their insights and Auður Magndís Auðardóttir for reading various drafts of this article. We also thank Anna Rós Árnadóttir for gathering the media interviews this article is based on.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For the authors’ positionality statement see: https://sites.google.com/view/positionality-nbb

2. In this article, we have chosen to remove all names and minimize information that might identify the interviewees. This is done because the Icelandic population is very small, making it easy to identify the men in question, as well as to emphasize that the focus of this article is not the remarks and representation of the individuals themselves but the discourses that are co-constructed by the interviewee, reporter, media, and society as a whole. All direct quotes from Icelandic sources are translated by the authors.

3. The first official Pride march took place in 2000, but an outdoor concert in Reykjavík in 1999 is often considered the first Pride celebration in Iceland.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Icelandic Centre for Research under Grant Number 206625-053.