Sexual Boundaries and Subcultural Discipline

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the mechanisms of power around classifications of gender and sexuality are not always top-down or bottom-up. Instead, the weight of social discipline among members of sexual subcultures themselves helps to create these classifications, often reflecting the nomenclature of subjects and desires within sexual subcultures in a complex relationship to a dominant culture. Critically examining two benchmarks in the development of sexual nomenclature within queer subcultures, this paper finds its evidence in George Chauncey’s little known analysis (1985) of a navy investigation of male homosexuality at the Newport Naval Training Station during the World War I era and in contemporary folksonomic classifications of representations of queer desire within Xtube, a database of online pornography. Social discipline within these sexual subcultures occurs in the stabilization of nomenclature through socialization and through members' overt intervention into each others' self-understanding. Both the Newport and Xtube evidence also reveals a complex social and cultural structure among members of sexual subcultures by drawing our attention to the particularity of various modes of sexual being and the relationship between those modes and particular configurations of sexual identity. In the process, this paper allows us to reassess, first, a presupposition of folksonomies as free of discipline allowing for their emancipatory potential and, second, the prevailing binary understandings of authority in the development of sexual nomenclatures and classifications as either top-down or bottom-up.

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