Elsevier

Appetite

Volume 144, 1 January 2020, 104453
Appetite

“Macho food”: Masculinities, food preferences, eating practices history and commensality among gay bears in São Paulo, Brazil

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2019.104453Get rights and content

Abstract

This article describes and explore eating practices and food preferences among gay men who call themselves bears in São Paulo, Brazil, and their relation with their life history, masculinities representations, and sexuality. It is a qualitative and quantitative research within an ethnographic perspective. A purposive sample of thirty-five self-declared gay bears. The data were analyzed identifying the regular, expressive and meaningful significance units collected through the interviews. We identified that the self-declared bears in São Paulo, Brazil, build a solid relation between food preferences, eating practices, masculinity, and group belonging. From the bear's perspective, meat, especially bovine, is related to masculinity and extensively understood as a strong common bond within the community, leveraging their sexuality. For these persons, eating meat as well as drinking beer can build the ideal mannish and unfeminine body that is overvalue. Being gay and “eating like a man,” as well as exposing a “macho” body while disdaining other body types constructions could represent a strategy to avoid discrimination, shame and humiliation. On the other way, this community does not just linearly imitate heterosexual men although their conducts can reproduce patriarchal representations and meanings through eating practices. These findings could be used to understand the complexity of alimentary practices, particularly food preferences as well as commensalities, among specific communities or membership groups.

Introduction

This research aims to articulate masculinities and sexualities in dialogue with eating practices, in particular food preferences, applied to a specific collective of gay men individuals who call themselves bears. This native category primarily covers gay men who have, among other features, fat bodies, abundant presence of body hair (Wright, 1997) and the idea of brotherhood through sharing eating practices. Regarding the few pieces of research made in the United States of America with this population (Suresha, 2002; Wright, 1997, 2001), the bear community has some characteristics that diverge from other sexual dissident (Binnie et al., 2008) communities. In Brazil, this group was born around 1990, with the physical characteristics above-mentioned as important standards required to belong to the group as well as being necessary conditions to succeed in attaining homoaffective and sexual intercourses (Domingos, 2010; Lins França, 2012).

Food practices per se are not isolated from their contexts: they are established in relation to the dimensions of time, illness, health, affection, care, economy and socialization and are built through a network of social relations (Rotenberg & De Vargas, 2004). In this sense, we consider the broader definition of eating by Hintze (1997), which conceptualizes it as a material and symbolic problem comprising “the set of issues that arise around the food phenomenon related to the practices, processes, products and consequences of the feeding of societies and subjects” (p. 11). Regarding these considerations, Lins França (2012), researched the spaces of consumption, lifestyles, class and sociability among different groups of gays in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, among them the bears. The author notes that the bears eat “substantial foods like refusing to care for themselves” especially rejecting the practice of diets and the consumption of light foods (p. 165), while building a kind of belonging, in terms of gender and sexuality. Based on Lins França's discussion, we argue that the crossroads between food preferences, eating practices, masculinity and sexuality deserve in-depth research in order to understand the underlying logic of the mentioned intersections. For, as D'Emilio (2006) states, identities and collectives are products of a historical becoming, which respond to certain social, cultural, political and economic conditions. Food and gender are not separate from this process.

Deepening this logic, the bear is a person who rejects aesthetic hegemony based on youth and/or muscular or thin bodies, as well as on a supposedly healthy diet. Thus, he appropriates a subversive body (Fernandez, 2004) and values fat foods because they produce a form of eroticism originated in bigger body volume and hairy abundance among other characteristics. Furthermore, a bear establishes a contrasting identity (Poutignat & Streiff-Fenart, 1997) with other sexualities (homo or hetero sex affective) challenging hegemonic ethic-aesthetic aspects of other sexual dissident collectives (Suresha, 2002).

As subjects with bodies and ages that supposedly deviate from the hegemonic and homogenizing parameters of gay aesthetics, they are confined to specific spaces of sociability that, we believe, deserve the attention of researchers in order to understand food preferences and commensality among them. We are not affirming that the material existence of these bodies necessarily rests in specific physical care or that in all cases these subjects submit themselves consciously and voluntarily to a certain diet to acquire a protruding belly. Rather, we suggest that the corporal materiality of this collective proposes a certain message and a specific type of eroticism that defines a distinct and voluntary belonging.

Furthermore, our interest in this study is to question a possible articulating relationship between these persons that declare themselves masculine, fat and bears, and the food that they choose in order to identify themselves in a group. We highlight that such relations have not yet been investigated among this population, and such understanding will add to the current literature on the construction of masculinity through food. In that sense, is important to understand what people eat but also how much and with whom (and their reasons), among other possible questions.

Section snippets

Study design

This research is part of the main study titled “The erotic belly: Intersections between Health, Gender, Food and Sexuality among the Homosexual Bear Community in the City of São Paulo, Brazil.” The main study aimed to describe, analyze and explain how a specific community of the many different LGBTQI + groups in the São Paulo urban scenario, the bears, perceived, described and narrated their eating practices and food preferences. We have put these dimensions in dialogue with their gender, their

Results and discussion

We divided the participant's narratives in three life periods in order to accommodate the results in chronological order and, thus, to be able to identify their eating history in dialogue with their masculinities and sexualities constructions. The majority of the subjects were from the city of São Paulo or the interior of the State and all lived in the city or its surroundings. Six declared to have been born in other states of Brazil: Bahia, Minas Gerais, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná.

To be a man

Allusions to what a man should be like and what a woman should be like, how they should behave, how they should relate and, most importantly, how and what and with whom they should eat, were presented in this research, from the beginning to the end, through the voice of the participants involved. Masculinity appears - or rather, imposes itself - in the way Connell (1992) constructs the idea of masculinity: not as a thing or an isolated phenomenon, but as a whole system of references that places

Conclusion

According to our research, eating practices and food preferences among gay bears in São Paulo, Brazil, are closely related to a type of masculinity performance. This masculinity relays on a certain type of body and choosing and eating a certain type of food that is preferred and also perceived as “masculine”; in emic terms: “macho food,” In this sense, the food history of the subjects, from their childhood to the present day, in dialogue with the constructions of gender and sexuality composed

Authorship

RF Unsain participated in all the steps of this research, from the design and implementation to the writing. M Dimitrov participated in some phases of the research and the final writing and critical review; PdM Sato participated in the final writing and critical review of the article. F Sabatini and MSda Silva Oliveira participated in the final draft of the paper in some phases of the research and FB Scagliusi participated in the research design and final writing of the article.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare having no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Federal University of São Paulo (Number 1.384.866). This research was financed by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), under the process number 2015/12235-8 granted to Ramiro Andres Fernandez Unsain and by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), under the process 309514/2018–5.

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