Content area
Full text
Abstract
Gay men's body image issues are typically examined from two distinct paradigms: thinness and muscularity. These two conventional paradigms may be conceptualised as the old and new orthodoxy respectively. Much of the research findings of the old orthodoxy compared gay men and lesbians with heterosexual men and women, and tended to feminise gay men and masculinise lesbians. The research findings of the new orthodoxy on the other hand, have tended to portray gay men as seemingly conflicted by the competing demands of being thin and muscular. Both orthodoxies portray gay men as obsessed with their appearance and tend towards the pathologising of gay men. Furthermore, both assert the need for prevention and treatment programs to ameliorate the supposed distress gay men experience due to the pursuit of an unrealistic body ideal. Unfortunately, however, both research paradigms almost universally fail to engage in any critical analysis of the dominant research they cite in the construction of the effeminate thin gay man desperately clinging to his youth or the body-obsessed low-fat gay man always working out at the gym. This article critically reviews the methodologies, data analysis and theoretical inferences of the research within both paradigms, and argues - echoing recent research in the field - that gay (and heterosexual) men's body image is a m ulti faceted construct that is better informed by a broad, diverse and complex worldview than simplistic and popular ist binary formulations of gender and sexual orientation.
Keywords: gay men, body image, critical analysis
Introduction
The struggle for sexual self-determination is a struggle in the end for control over our bodies. To establish this control we must escape from those ideologies and categorizations which imprison us within the existing order (Weeks, 1980, pp. 19-20).
The dominant body of research on gay men's body image issues can be organised into two distinct but related domains: the pursuit of thinness and the quest for greater muscularity. These two conventional paradigms may be conceptualised as the old and new orthodoxy respectively. The old orthodoxy emerged from early clinical studies (e.g., Herzog, Norman, Gordon, & Pepose, 1984; Schneider & Agras, 1987) and later larger non-clinical studies (e.g., Williamson & Spence, 2001). This research displayed a general tendency towards pathologising or feminising gay men...