2nd Global Conference
Wednesday 30th November - Saturday
3rd December 2005
Vienna, Austria
Session 1: Connecting With Others
Chair: Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Work of Friendship: Role and Meaning
of Gay Men’s Workplace Friendships
Nicholas
Rumens
School of Business, Southampton Institute of Higher Education, Southampton,
United Kingdom
Recent
studies have been invaluable for drawing attention to how gay men's
friendships may serve as critical sites for the reproduction of gay
selves
both culturally and politically (see Weeks et al., 2001; Nardi, 1999).
Yet,
little empirical material has examined the role and meaning of gay
men's
friendship in the workplace. As a result of this neglect issues concerning
how work friendships can be important locales for gay men to construct
identities and experiment with schemas of intimate relations and modes
of
being in the world, remain hidden and under-researched. Drawing on
in-depth
qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews with gay men employed
in
a range of UK public sector work organizations, this paper aims to
explore
the possibilities gay men's friendships invoke for reflecting on
self-conduct, knowledge and normativity in the workplace.
Of particular
interest is the idea that friendship is a discursive location
where the men can contest and reproduce normative constructions of
gender
and sexuality. Adopting a theoretical position informed by Foucauldian
and
gay and lesbian studies perspectives, this paper argues that gay men's
friendships at work can, indeed, be seen at one and the same as a site
for
resistance and generative of dominant views of men, masculinities and
men's
practices that reinforce their subject positions as organizational
'Others'.
In this vein, gay men's workplace friendships are politicized, in that
they
can potentially offer alternative discursive configurations of being
gay,
heterosexual and masculine in work contexts. Indeed, study findings
show
that some heterosexual men sought aid and advice from their male gay
work
friends about changing their own expressions of masculinity. Similarly,
the
reported friendships between gay male and heterosexual female co-workers
indicated that the 'queer eye' of the gay man was used in multiple
ways;
from dispensing advice on matters of bodily aesthetics, sex and husbands,
to
a laser-like analysis of the rigidity of the dominant gender order.
The
paper concludes by exploring and supporting a line of theorizing gay
men's
friendships at work being riddled with internal contradictions and
paradoxical in nature.
Metaminorities and Mental Health: Pathways
of vulnerability for Black and Minority Ethnic Queer Folk
Roshan
das Nair
Clinical Research Group, School of Psychology, University
of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
Mental illness is widespread
and undertreated, with varying rates of incidence amongst different
communities, and disproportionate resource allocation to address these
issues around the world. Recent epidemiological surveys have consistently
found an elevated rate of mental health (MH) problems amongst the lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) populations. However, even within this
vulnerable community, there exist several other sub-communities (or “meta-minorities”)
that have additional stressors, making them more vulnerable to developing
MH problems.
Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) LGBT individuals living
in a predominantly White western world are one such meta-minority.
Being a multiply disadvantaged people, they are vulnerable to developing
depression, anxiety spectrum disorders, substance misuse related problems,
eating disorders, deliberate self harm, and sexual dysfunctions. Homophobia
and heterosexism (from the society in general, and the BME society
in particular), and racism (from the society in general, and the majority-LGBT
community in particular) increase the risk of developing and maintaining
some of these problems. Despite these high rates of MH problems, and
suicide, little is done to support and treat this group.
This paper
reviews the literature on BME-LGBT MH issues, and proposes a model
of the psychosocial pathways of vulnerability to developing MH problems.
It addresses difficulties related to identity formation and acceptance,
LGBT visibility, and the contentious issue of “coming
out” in the BME context. It explores the relationship between
these issues and high risk behaviours, in the background of HIV and
other STDs. It also postulates the impediments faced in accessing MH
services, and examines why mainstream health services are not always
supportive of BME-LGBT people. It concludes by proposing a framework
for imparting psychoeducation and therapeutic interventions to this
group, and making recommendations to mitigate, if not improve, the
current MH crises this meta-minority faces.
Dressed Up in the Latest Drag: Melancholia,
Identification, and Group Formation
Aisling
Cormack Aboud
English and Comparative Literature,
University of California, Irvine, USA
Sigmund Freud
argues that the force that causes multiple people to
submit voluntarily to a single will is Eros. When a child
melancholically identifies with a parent who is the object of
unrequited love (“introjecting” into the ego-ideal the
beloved
superior’s repressive, censorious demands) this is his or her
first
submission to social morality. “Character” is lodged in
the
ego-ideal, which Freud figures as an interior space whose contents
are the history of a series of introjected object-choices up to the
most recent, perhaps a commander-in-chief in the army or Jesus in the
Christian church. The latest identification absolutely consumes the
devoted lover and silences all earlier identifications. The
remarkable consequence of “being in love” is that all previous
character formation is overturned, according to Freud’s model,
which
could either lead to altruistic, ethical conduct or the height of
criminality, all depending on the object of love. The melancholia of
multiple people for a single ideal can fuel a revolution in which new
laws and standards of behaviour emerge. However, the same melancholia
that binds a group together simultaneously undermines any notion that
the group has an essential commonality or foundation. Freud’s
description of melancholia’s role in group formation ends up
deessentializing and historicizing the very identifications that, in
other places, he posits to be primary and originary. Identification,
according to Judith Butler, is a material rather than a psychic
process that involves first one’s fantasy of a social role and
subsequent projection of this fantasy onto the external body.
Butler’s uses the practice of drag to evince the power of the
individual to mix and match traditionally incommensurate discursive
practices. In parodying culturally sanctioned roles, one reveals
him/herself as the fragmented product of multiple subject positions
in addition to revealing the illusory, unstable nature of each
particular subject position.