Session 10a: Self, Intimacies and Friendship
Chair: Adam Briggle

The Construction of a Feeling: History of Affection and Partnering Between Men in Mexico City
Gabriel Gallego Montes

The debate over the socially constructed nature of gay, lesbian, transvestite, transsexual and transgender realities, identities and specificities has been consistently permeated by the following question: How have affection, caring, and the expression of love between people of the same sex been historically constructed? An attempt at responding to this question, taking specifically into account affection between men in Mexico City, reveals various problematic issues. In the literature available on homoerotism in Mexico, I have found an historical fragmentation which does not allow for a straightforward identification of the continuities and ruptures regarding what is prohibited, what is permitted, and what is ignored in the construction of feeling between men. I have been able to identify four discursive ruptures that reveal the ambiguous construction of homoerotism as an element which is not excluded from the construction of masculinity in Mexican urban society.
In this order of ideas, it is possible to evidence how, during the nineteenth century, “profound friendships” between men became the stage that made public displays of affection between men possible. Nevertheless, the modern criminality discourse brought a panoptic effect upon the institution of friendship, not making it disappear as an institution, but rather transforming the codes and norms of the expression of affection and corporal interaction between men. Today, such norms are understood within the framework of “cuatismo.” (Cuatismo could best be translated as “buddyism.” The word “cuate” is used in Mexican Spanish to refer to close friends.) In the first half of the twentieth century, three patterns of affection between men were identified and described in Mexican literature. These patterns reflect how urban society at the time represented love and affection between men. In the mid-twentieth century, it is possible to trace the transition of the notion of “my friend” to “my partner,” demonstrating not only the incorporation of new expressions, but also a change in the meaning and a taking up of the idea of partnership between men, investing it with substantive content of its own. We could say that the use of the category of “partner” in reference to erotic-affectionate relations between men only becomes possible with the advent and taking up of the gay-lesbian discourse, and with the coming-out process. These processes generate new conditions of possibility, but also new prohibitions and exclusions.

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Love and Friendship between Women in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and The Unlit Lamp
Kerstin Fest
Department of German, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

In this paper I propose to look at the depiction of friendship and love in the novels of Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943). Hall is most widely known as the author of The Well of Loneliness (1928), a book often hailed as the bible of lesbianism and made notorious by a widely publicized obscenity trial after which it was banned from publication in the UK.
In The Well of Loneliness Hall describes the life of Stephen Gordon. Stephen is, according to contemporary sexological discourse, a congenital invert, a mannish woman who displays a variety of ‘masculine’ character traits and consequently also desires other women. Although Stephen’s romantic and sexual relationships with other women are central to the novel, their depiction is by no means an unambiguous account of lesbian relationships. Stephen’s dealings with other women are rather a constant negotiation of her own inverted (or – in the view of the 21st century – transsexual) identity. Her love affairs with other women are a desperate attempt to recreate a stereotypical heterosexual relationship (modelled on her idolized parent’s marriage) with her playing the masculine part and a struggle to come to terms with her mother, who is presented as the quintessential heterosexual feminine woman and ultimately rejects her deviant adoring daughter.
Issues of normative and deviant versions of feminine identity are also at the core of Hall’s lesser known earlier novel, The Unlit Lamp (1924). Also in this text the inverted heroine’s mother represents heterosexual, ‘normal’ femininity. The relationship and love between mother and daughter is presented as extreme and unhealthy with the mother constantly stunting her daughter’s ambitions. The alternative is the ‘pure’ and noble friendship between the protagonist and her teacher, an unmarried independent woman.
Both novels offer a challenging view of love between women by presenting a variety of relationships between females and also clearly show how love and friendship are intrinsically entangled with issues of identity and acceptance

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Masculine Identities and Affective Equality; The Role of Love and Care in Men's Lives
Niall Hanlon
Equality Studies Centre, School of Social Justice, University College Dublin, Ireland

The conference paper will outline concurrent PhD research on masculine identities and affective equality. The research commenced in September 2005 at the Equality Studies Centre. The purpose of the research is to examine the way a diversity of men in Irish society perceive the role of love and care labour in their lives. The paper outlines methodological and theoretical foundations of the research as well as some preliminary empirical findings.
The research is attempting to bring together two theoretical traditions, equality studies, and masculinities studies. Equality studies are interdisciplinary studies of equality, which recognise four generative sources of inequality within production, power, symbolic, and affective relations (Baker et al 2004). Affective equalities are concerned with who has access to relations of love, care, and solidarity, and with the labour relations of love and care work (Lynch & Mc Laughlin 1995, Lynch 1989, 2005). Within masculinities studies Connell (1987; 2000; 2005) describes a gender order within which there exists hierarchical relations of masculinities. The gender order of hierarchical masculinities contain crisis tendencies, or tensions, which in different contexts can result in ‘toxicity’ in men’s affective relations.
Posing the question; how do different men define their masculinity in relation to love and care labour, the research explores the hypothesis that dominant definitions of masculinities write-out, or seriously restrict, the role that love and care plays in men’s lives. The research is attempting to integrate first, second and third person voices (Coghlan & Brannick 2005). The research design involves critical self-reflection, a dialogical interview approach, and engagement with civil society men’s groups. The research has purposively sampled twenty-five male respondents in relation to key societal divisions in Irish society including social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, and ethnicity. Additionally, five insiders, or key-informants represent important men’s interest groups in in-depth qualitative interviews.

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