Overview

Bodies and Boundaries of UK Bear Spaces is an exploration of the spaces of the UK’s Bear community – and the people who are in them. The book details a wealth of existing writing and scholarship on Bears – both historical and contemporary – and uses new empirical research to demonstrate and explain the complexity of ‘Bear’ in the present-day UK. Moving beyond a focus on masculine attitudes, it emphasises the importance of bodily appearance for Bear communities while also demonstrating the variety of bodies in Bear spaces, and the variety amongst Bear spaces themselves. Resisting universalist accounts, the book calls for greater engagement with the conceptual instability and geographic variation of ‘Bear’. Written for both academic and non-academic readers, the book combines an engaging conversational style with excerpts from a rich qualitative dataset to help explain new ways of looking at Bears or ‘Bear/y’ men. Bodies & Boundaries of UK Bear Spaces is of value to anyone interested in Bears and/or LGBTQ spaces – particularly in the UK context. It also offers much for scholars of men and masculinities, bodies and fatness, gender studies, and sexuality and queer studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

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9781032140360

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Reviews

“With this book Nick McGlynn moves beyond an interrogation of ‘Bear’ as a gay subcultural identity, to examine how ‘Bear/yness’ is produced through the relationships between bodies and places. In doing so, Nick not only offers fresh new insights into who Bears are, what they do, and where. He also demonstrates the value of geographical thinking to understanding contemporary queer spaces and cultures.” Gavin Brown, Visiting Professor of Geography, University College Dublin and CEO of Trade Sexual Health, Leicester “Nick McGlynn immerses you in the world of Bear spaces - or better, Bear/y spaces as we come to learn - with much humour and insight in this pageturner disguised as academic text. The combination of everyday practices with theoretical insights, and the personal with the political, makes this book appealing and relevant for a broad audience, whether you are a regular to GBQ nightlife in the UK, a feminist, an academic working on sexualities, or just a fan of Bears.” Valerie De Craene, Guest Professor in Geography at Ghent University, Belgium

Author Information

Nick McGlynn is a senior lecturer in Geography at the University of Brighton (UK). His research has explored the experiences of fat GBQ men in UK Bear spaces; the geographies of LGBTQ equalities and policymaking; and making ‘liveable’ lives for sexual and gender minorities.

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