UC Irvine

In this dissertation, I examine understandings and practices of love among gay men participating in the Malaysian Bear community. Bears are a subculture predominantly composed of gay, bisexual, and queer men who valorize and eroticize fat, hirsute, and aging bodies that tend to be stigmatized in mainstream gay and straight communities. I ethnographically explore how being part of the Malaysian Bear community helps my interlocutors navigate the double marginalization that stems from being gay in a country that criminalizes non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality, and from being fat in a social environment that limits them due to their size. My investigation of how love and romantic relationships are part of, and contribute to, the creation and recognition of these men’s lifeworlds—the world as they immediately and subjectively experience it in their everyday lives—has been guided by four research questions: What does love mean to these men, and how is it practiced? What forms do their romantic relationships take and why? How do understandings of love connect to ideas about gender, the body, and sexuality? What are individual and sociocultural implications of gay men’s constructions and practices of love?During my ten-year engagement with queer men in Malaysia and 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur, I researched how members of the Bear community negotiate masculinity, sexuality, and the body through the lens of love—specifically, queer love. In my work, I conceptualize queer love not simply as a form of being, but rather a form of doing. Accordingly, I argue that queer love is a relational practice that does not only allow my interlocutors to forge romantic bonds with other men, but also forces them to confront their self-understanding. In other words, it compels them to reconsider the social positions they occupy in relation to their romantic and sexual partners, friends, families, communities, society at large, and the state. Ultimately, I show that their conceptions, experiences, and practices of love shape, and are shaped by, the men’s self-perception and are integral to their process of becoming—becoming men, becoming gay men, becoming fat, gay men, becoming fat, gay, male romantic partners.