‘The body that cannot be contained’: Queering mainstream psychology’s gay male body dissatisfaction imperative

Abstract

A sizable body of mainstream social psychological body image research suggests that gay men are more dissatisfied with their bodies than heterosexual men (Morrison et al., 2004). However, much of this research has been criticized for producing explanatory models that pathologize gay men by foregrounding homosexuality, irrespective of broader sociohistorical factors, as the source of gay male body dissatisfaction (Filiault, 2010; Filiault and Drummond, 2009; Kane, 2009, 2010) – what we refer to as psychology’s gay male body dissatisfaction imperative. Situated within a critical psychology perspective (Teo, 2015), this article relies on the voices of 19 gay/queer participants to problematize psychology’s epistemological determinism. Their ‘talk’ was less interiorized and totalized than the models’ conceptualizations of gay male identity and body image, highlighting the need for models that instead explicate how gay men develop individual, embodied understandings of sexual and gender identity while navigating heterosexist, masculinist, and neoliberal discourses. We investigate the corporeal manifestations of discourse and pay specific attention to queer forms of embodied resistance.