The colour of gayness: Representations of queers of colour in Québec’s gay media

Abstract

Various stereotypes of racialized sexuality seem to be prevalent among White gay men, effectively objectifying other men and thus building frontiers. Drawing from a critical discourse analysis of three main gay magazines (Fugues, RG, and Être), this article will discuss how differences are constructed and performed in the symbolic representation of male homosexuality in the French-speaking gay media in Québec. This analysis, informed by both an intersectional feminist theorization and the poststructuralist thought of Judith Butler, is based on a discursive analysis of these three magazines' articles since 2000, as well as the visual representations on their front covers.

Keywords

Homosexuality immigrants intersectionality Québec representation

The ‘gay liberation movement’ has been the object of many critiques, particularly regarding its essentialism (Seidman, 1997), its implicit emphasis on White middle-class gay men (Bérubé, 2001; Teunis, 2007), and its assimilationist and neoliberal identity politics (Duggan, 2003). In Québec’s context, the feminist lesbian critique divided the gay liberation movement around the same time as it did in the USA. In the 1970s, Montreal Gay Women was founded in response to the sexism lived by lesbians in Gay Montreal, while the Front de liberation homosexuel and the Comité homosexuel anti-répression were mostly composed of gay men (Higgins, 1999; Hildebran 1998; Sivry, 1998). Québec’s gay liberation movement was also divided between English- and French-speaking activists, each forming their own groups.¹

But the anti-essentialist queer critique and the anti-racist queer of colour critique have been much less heard, even if the latter’s situation has lately become a public issue. In its 2007 report on the situation of LGBT persons, Québec’s Human Rights Commission devoted five pages to queer immigrants, highlighting three problems: homophobia within ‘cultural communities,’ exclusion within LGBT communities, and homophobia within immigration services. One interesting finding is ‘the almost total absence of representation of individuals from cultural minorities both in main community organizations and in the gay and lesbian media (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse, 2007: 49; my translation).

In the last few years, the Montréal branch of Helem² launched an anti-homophobia campaign in Arabic targeted at Lebanese and Middle Eastern immigrants in Montréal, while organizations of queer immigrants formed the Multimundo Coalition in order to address the needs of queer immigrants and to inform the larger community. In addition, the organizers of the annual anti-homophobia campaign in 2009 emphasized the theme of homophobia among immigrant minorities in their programming.

All this may be related to a tension voiced by queers of colour that exists between the local gay community and individuals from ethnic or racial minorities, involving either the latter’s complete exclusion and non-representation or their objectification as e(x/r)otic bodies by the former. This article will discuss this tension in relation to Québec’s French-speaking gay community. Informed by Judith Butler’s poststructuralist thought as well as Patricia Hill Collins’ Black feminism, this article is based on a critical discourse analysis of Québec’s three main gay magazines from January 2000 to December 2009. The first part of the article will look at similar research in other cultural contexts and will present my theoretical articulation. The ensuing section will detail my methodology and give some information related to Québec’s context. A third part will focus on representations of queers of colour on magazine covers while a final section will analyse articles on queer immigrants.

Representations in/by discourses

The sexualized representation of racial and ethnic differences is surely not peculiar to gay communities and has been a long-lasting object of study for Black feminists. The figures of the nanny, the jezebel, the crack mother, and the welfare queen illustrate the imbrications of race, gender, sexuality, and class in depreciative representations of Black women (Collins, 2000 [1990]; Hancock, 2004). Their analysis reveals how blackness is constructed in different ways, but always informed by the perceived sexuality of Black women as excessive, available, while the figure of the Black male is one of wildness, eroticism and prowess (Hall, 1997; hooks, 1992; Mercer and Julien, 1988).

A similar phenomenon has been documented for queers of colour, notably in gay media where they tend to be stereotyped as the effeminate Asian man and the hyper-masculine Black man. A common theme underlying all these representations is the idea of excess: of femininity or masculinity, of sensuality, and of sexual activity or passivity, an excess defined by the norm of the young White middle-class gay man, who is the epitomic figure of gayness (Bérubé, 2001; Fejes, 2003 [2001]; Goltz 2007; Han, 2008; Saucier and Caron, 2008; Teunis, 2007).

Saucier and Caron’s (2008) analysis of The Advocate, Genre, Instinct and Out is especially telling: from 2001 to 2004, it appears that 95% of men depicted in advertisements are Caucasian, while 93% have a youthful appearance. These results may be compared to Eshref’s (2009) analysis of images in The Advocate, DNA, Out and Instinct from 2005 to 2008. White males account for between 60.1% (DNA) to 71.8% (Instinct) of representations, while the largest representation of ethnic minorities is in DNA, with Asians accounting for 18.2% of representations, followed by Blacks in The Advocate (17.1%). Interestingly, Asians in DNA appear mostly in feminized and subordinate poses, while most representations of Blacks in The Advocate are of heterosexual African or African-American leaders. The poor representation of queers of colour is even more visible on magazine covers: White males account for 88.4% of representations, while Blacks account for 5.9%, Hispanics for 3%, and Asians for 1.7%. Sonnekus and van Eeden (2009), following their similar analysis of Gay Pages, a South African gay magazine, refer to a ‘spiral of silence’: the accumulation of representations of whiteness in gay magazines reinforces the association between gayness and whiteness, and thus silences other images.

Such stereotypical representations of the Other cannot be adequately understood outside of power relations. Having the power to define those stereotypical images helps one to maintain and essentialize one’s power, but also reduces the ability of the oppressed to define themselves (Collins, 2000 [1990]; hooks, 1992). Representations are indeed paradoxical: while being represented or representing oneself renders the Self visible, it also constrains what is (il)legitimate and (il)licit. As such, Michel Foucault (2001 [1982]) was right when he argued that the possibility of saying one’s homosexuality is both a categorical constraint and an opportunity to contest its limitations. Representations of queers of colour in gay media are thus important to understand because they allow us to realize what kind of visibility is given to them, how they are rendered intelligible and licit as subjects, and if they are rather commoditized objects or excluded abjects.

The previous results suggest the ‘intersectional’ character of representations. Intersectionality, a concept coined at the end of the 1980s in critical race studies (Crenshaw, 1989), will be used here through the work of Collins (2000 [1990], 2004). For Collins, intersectionality first refers to a matrix of oppression, in which interlocking systems of oppressions are always interacting: the White middle-class gay man may be in a subordinated social position because of heterosexism, but this may well be counterbalanced by the privilege of his colour in racist, sexist and classist systems. Second, it refers to intersections of axes of differentiation (race, gender, class, sexuality, and so on) and their contextual significations, informing the social identity and experiences of a person.

More important to my analysis, Collins distinguishes four domains of power: the structural (social institutions), disciplinary (organizational practices), hegemonic (ideology and culture), and interpersonal domains (everyday social interactions) (Collins, 2000 [1990]). The hegemonic domain is the one with which I am concerned: by manipulating images, symbols, and ideologies, dominant groups can legitimize their own position by assigning stigmatized characteristics to the Other.

Though Collins detaches herself from Butler’s poststructuralist thought (Collins, 1998), I find it useful to place both approaches in a dialogue. In Collins’ work the hegemonic domain of power cements the other domains and it is through this former domain that social agents are defined and can enact a re-articulation of those images. According to Butler (1990, 1993), as we experience our lives through language, subjectivity is intrinsically delimited by the borders of this language. Thus, the linguistic representation of the category ‘gay’ normatively defines what is and should be a ‘gay subject’; a sexed and gendered subject is constituted and constrained, while others are constituted as abjects, undervalued and relegated to the margins. The performativity of these norms, that is, their daily reiteration in social practices – discourses, social interactions, presentations of Self, as well as mediated representations of Self and others alike in gay media – precisely constitutes this proper subject and constrains his/her agency, a process shown by Sonnekus and van Eeden (2009) as the ‘spiral of silence’.

Methodology

Critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003) allows me to link these theoretical considerations with empirical data: as social actors perceive social realities and act on them through language and discourses, social analysis must take discourses into account, especially since they affect people’s beliefs, attitudes and actions.

For the purpose of this analysis, all the issues of Québec’s three main monthly French gay magazines have been reviewed from January 2000 to December 2009:³ Fugues (‘Running away’), founded in 1984, is the most important of the three because of its size (around 200 pages), its circulation of 48,500 copies, and its 200,000 readers; RG (Rencontres Gaies, ‘Gay encounters’), published since 1981, with a circulation of 11,000 copies,⁴ and around 40 pages per issue; and Être (‘To be’ or ‘Being’), published since 1998, with a circulation of 20,000 copies, and around 40 pages per issue. Each magazine is freely distributed across the province,⁵ mainly at entrances of establishments frequented by LGBT persons. Both RG and Être are moreover available on the internet while much of Fugues’ articles are also published on its website.

For each magazine, there were two data gathering processes. Firstly, I coded the representations on all front covers, focusing on who was represented (male/female, White/Black/East and Southeast Asian/Middle Eastern and North African/Latino,⁶ and young/aged⁷) and how (alone/group, in which context, with or without clothes, body hair, and musculature). Secondly, I collected all articles about queers of colour in Québec. I first looked at how issues were framed and how the actors and events were contextualized. Among the presented events and actors, I paid attention to patterns of foregrounding and backgrounding. I also looked at assumptions, an important part of texts because they allow a group to share an implicit understanding of what exists and what is valuable (Fairclough, 2003). My analysis then focused on representational meanings: which actors and events were present, and more precisely, how they were arranged, valued, and stereotyped; which were excluded; and whether actors were represented as active subjects, passive objects, or excluded abjects.

Before going on with the analysis, Québec’s gay magazines must be put in their larger context. Despite Québec’s progressive politics toward LGBT persons and the legal equality attained in recent years, the public visibility of homosexuality largely remains confined to urban areas, especially Montréal, the only city with an extensive gay neighbourhood and where sexual differences seem to be more accepted (Julien and Lévy, 2007). It is in this Village, located in what was a ‘French-Canadian’ working class neighbourhood, that one finds most of Montréal’s gay venues and where gay magazines are mostly distributed. All of Québec’s queer immigrant associations can also be found in this same neighbourhood. If Montréal holds a strong attraction for LGBT persons, it is also true for immigrants: according to the 2006 Canadian census, 86.9% of Québec’s immigrant population⁸ live in the Montréal region, while this region accounts for 48.3% of Québec’s overall population. Immigrants comprise 20.6% of Montréal’s population, a proportion much smaller than Toronto (45.7%) and Vancouver (39.6%) (Québec, 2009). From 2005 to 2009, the main regions of origin of immigrants in Québec were North Africa (19.9%), South America (10.8%), western and northern Europe (10%), eastern Europe (9.2%), East Asia (7.2%), the Middle East (6.7%), South Asia (6%) and the Caribbean (5.4%) (Québec, 2010). Considering how gay magazines are produced and mainly read in Montréal, as well as Montréal’s strong attraction for both LGBT and immigrant populations, it is even more interesting to analyse how these magazines represent Québec’s queers of colour.

Bodies of gays and the gay body: The visual representation of gayness in Québec

As Table 1⁹ shows, the White young male is the most frequent object represented: more than two-thirds of those pictured in RG and almost half of those pictured in Fugues. Être is the exception, with slightly more than one-third of those represented being White young males. The second object of representation in order of importance is older White men, but it must be said that, especially for Fugues, almost half of older men are public figures (activists, writers, actors, and so on). This partly supports Eshref’s (2009) analysis of The Advocate and Out, in which he also found a significant proportion of public figures among older males. My results, however, indicate a weaker importance of age than what seems prevalent elsewhere (Eshref, 2009; Saucier and Caron, 2008). All three publications display White men on the vast majority of their covers without regard for their age: from 60% for Être to 76.7% for Fugues and 83.6% for RG. If I only take into account representations of men, as Eshref did, White men then account for 89.4% of magazine cover representations, nearly the same result as Eshref (88.4%).

Table 1.

Representations on the front covers of Québec’s gay magazines

	Fugues		RG		Être		Total
	Frequency	%	Frequency	%	Frequency	%	Frequency	%
White young men	92	46.7	91	67.9	48	38.4	231	50.6
Older White men	59	30	21	15.7	27	21.6	107	23.5
White young women	13	6.6	0	0	10	8	23	5
Older White women	14	7.1	2	1.5	13	10.4	29	6.4
Men of color	12	6.1	17	12.7	11	8.8	40	8.8
Black drag queens	3	1.5	0	0	3	2.4	6	1.3
White drag queens	4	2	3	2.2	12	9.6	19	4.2
Women of color	0	0	0	0	1	0.8	1	0.2
Total	197	100	134	100	125	100	456	100

Women, both young and old, form a minority in Fugues (13.7%) and Être (19.2%), and are barely visible on the covers of RG (1.5%). Public figures account for half of older White women represented in all three magazines, a pattern similar to that of older White men in Fugues. Interestingly, only two front covers of Fugues, one of RG, and seven of Être represent only women: five of them represent a single woman, Samantha Fox, who is the only lesbian to appear on the cover of these magazines. Furthermore, there has only been one woman of colour represented, on a cover of Être, and she is not even queer. Being a lesbian is obviously not enough to make it onto the front cover of a magazine aimed at LGBT communities. These results also suggest that the long-standing division between gay and lesbian issues and organizations is still prevalent.¹⁰

Men of colour are also a minority: 12 appear on the cover of Fugues, 17 on the cover of RG, and 11 on the cover of Être, but if we look at these numbers by year, we obtain rather interesting results: of all 40 men of colour, 16 were represented in 2009. If we exclude the year 2009, during which men of colour accounted for 34% of all those depicted, their representation falls from 8.8% to 5.9%. Among men of colour, Latinos and Blacks are by far the most frequent objects, with 25 and 10 occurrences. There are also three East and Southeast Asians (but none since September 2003) and two Middle Easterners or North Africans. This valuing of Latino men distinguishes Québec from other cultural contexts, in comparison to the higher proportion of Blacks in American gay magazines and of Asians in Australia’s DNA (Eshref, 2009). If results for Australia and the USA may be explained by the demographic importance of these minorities, my results highlight a singularity: given the importance of North Africa and the Middle East as regions of origin of immigrants in Montréal, why are there so few ‘Middle Eastern or North African’ men on the covers of gay magazines? Is it that the ‘Middle Eastern or North African’ man, as the Black man in the USA, is not presumed to be gay? Another significant difference between patterns of representation in Québec’s gay magazines and other gay magazines is that represented men of colour can be presumed gay: contrary to other magazines (Eshref, 2009), none of them are publicly known heterosexual public figures. Thus, these representations can be said to be more open than others to associating gayness with non-whiteness.

Even though the representation of men of colour has been stronger in 2007 (6) and 2008 (4), indicating a possible transformation in the representation of gayness, the year 2009 remains an exception. Three hypotheses could be advanced to explain such a difference. Firstly, the theme of the 2009 International Day Against Homophobia highlighted homophobia in ethnic communities. Secondly, the theme of Montréal’s 2009 Gay pride was ‘Fiesta,’ an explicit reference to the ‘colours’ and ‘warmth’ of Rio’s carnival.¹¹ Thirdly, the recent presence of Latino men in the staff of RG and Être may have had such an effect through authorial practices.¹² Since 15 of the 16 men of colour represented in 2009 may be coded as ‘Latino’, all three hypotheses may have contributed to this radical increase.

A further analysis of such representations can be seen in Table 2, which gives results relating to the depiction of model’s bodies, either by showing them shirtless or in underwear. Here, White young males are even more present: of the 175 representations foregrounding men’s bodies, 125 of them are of White young men. But not all White young men have their bodies highlighted: they must preferably be muscular, without body hair, and slim. These results arguably highlight the symbolic and intersectional frontiers of gayness in Québec, embodied by the White, young, able-bodied, muscular, and athletic male.

Table 2.

Foregrounding of bodies on the front covers of Québec’s gay magazines

	Fugues			RG			Être
	Total	Body foreground	%	Total	Body foreground	%	Total	Body foreground	%
White young men	92	42	45.7	91	54	59.3	48	29	60.4
Older White men	59	7	11.9	21	8	38.1	27	7	25.9
Men of color	12	6	50	17	15	88.2	11	7	63.6

An interesting finding concerns specific representations of men of colour. Although they are underrepresented on the front covers of Québec’s gay magazines, their bodies are not. Rather, their bodies are overrepresented through partial nudity and sensual poses. This is true in Fugues, where 50% of men of colour have their body clearly foregrounded compared to 45.7% of White young men, and even more in RG, with 88.2% of men of colour compared to 59.3% of White young men. It could thus be said that the bodies of men of colour are often fetishized and exoticized as objects of desire on the covers of Québec’s gay magazines.

These representations of the bodies of men of colour are mostly similar to North American stereotypical representations of racialized sexualities (Eng, 2001; Fung, 1991; Han, 2008; Mercer and Julien, 1988; Perez, 2005). RG’s covers are especially telling, with representations of heavy and strong Black men, of sensuous Latino men, and of soft, skinny, and rather ‘effeminate’ Asians. Fugues’ lesser emphasis on models’ bodies is accompanied by less stereotypical representations in terms of race/ethnicity; rather, Fugues’ representations of the bodies of men of colour are characterized by a striking similarity with the representation of White young men, a pattern similar to that of Être. Finally, the overall high proportion of Latinos among representations of men of colour tends to reinforce the dominant representation of gayness as being White, especially since Latino models on magazine covers tend to differ from their White peers by having slightly darker skin.

The queer immigrant comes out of the southern closet

Of all the 328 magazines reviewed, only 68 relevant texts were found: 45 in Fugues – nine of which were in a single issue in April 2002 – 16 in RG, and 7 in Être.¹³ These mostly consist of editorials on the plight of queer refugees, interviews with queer immigrants and refugees, brief news on immigration laws, and announcements of activities by queer immigrant associations.

Notwithstanding these numbers, which draw attention to the relatively poor representation of queers of colour, the texts’ contents are more important. By highlighting how these people’s experiences are contextualized by authors – that is, what theme or problem is covered, what is emphasized – I delineated five main frames, each occurring in the following order:¹⁴ marginalization and homophobia among ethnic and racial minorities (37); persecution in countries of origin (26); troubles with immigration law and procedures (19); racism, prejudices and stereotypes in Québec’s LGBT communities (16); and finally, the activities of queer immigrant organizations (14).

Interestingly, some of these frames tend to be highlighted. This is the case for ‘marginalization and homophobia among ethnic and racial minorities’ and ‘persecution in countries of origin’. In all three magazines, more than half of the articles begin with these frames and 16 articles devote most of their space to them. The association between these two frames, which particularly reoccurs in 2009, imparts an understanding of ethnic and racial minorities as reproducing the beliefs of their country of origin, such as in this excerpt: ‘Since new immigrants in Québec mostly come from Africa and Asia, we have to admit that the situation [homophobia among immigrants] will not improve in the following years unless something is done’ (Borgia, 2009: 7, my translation). The continuity of homophobia from the society of origin to post-migration is even clearer in another article in which the author qualifies the shame felt by families of gays and lesbians as: ‘A defect which lingers among ethnic communities here’ (Fugues, 2009: 60, 62, my translation).

In contrast to these two frames, a third one is almost always put in the background, relegated to the last paragraphs of corresponding articles: ‘racism, prejudices, and stereotypes in Québec’s LGBT communities.’ Only four articles are mostly devoted to this frame: one in RG and one in Être, both appearing in 2000, and two in Fugues in 2000 and 2007. The lesser importance of this frame could hypothetically be explained by low-levels of prejudice toward ethnic and racial diversity among Québec’s gay community and high-levels of homophobia among Québec’s ethnic minorities. Even if this were true – and we have no scientific data to back it up – all three magazines cited queer immigrants who complained about racism, intolerance, and denigrating stereotypes in gay organizations, places, and dating websites: ‘Because of my colour, I’m a stranger in the gay community. I still have not found any gay Québécois who really understands what I live through as a person of colour’ (a Haitian man, in Lafontaine, 2002: 61, my translation).

Québec’s gay magazines thus highlight homophobia among ethnic minorities and in countries of the South, while systematically relegating racism among White LGBT community members to the background. While it is true that queer immigrant discourses in the studied texts emphasize homophobic exclusion and stigmatization among ethnic and racial minorities, authorial practices in Québec’s gay media may also give voice to those who only criticize their own ethnic or racial communities and sparsely criticize LGBT communities. The fact that all but five of the articles are written by White men or women¹⁵ surely indicates that queer immigrants mostly speak through the (White) author’s gaze. In other contexts, such journalism and activism has been shown to silence and exclude the Other: those who do not disidentify from their ethnic origins (Haritaworn et al., 2008). This practice is clearly used in an editorial in Être, where the author indirectly gives voice to queer immigrants by criticizing the religious beliefs of their ethnic groups, ‘forcing them to re-enter in the closet while they wished to finally live free’ (Gagnon, 2009: 14, my translation). The ‘native voice’ of queer immigrants is called upon to justify the extreme position of the author against religion, above all immigrant religions: Islam, reduced to fundamentalism, appears as the main culprit that is inherently tied to homophobia. Although such an instrumental use of ‘native voices’ is rarely seen in Fugues, where articles are less essentializing and cover a larger range of issues, it remains that racism in Québec’s LGBT communities is very rarely addressed in a significant way.

The oppression of the closet and the desirability of coming out are the chief assumptions of almost all of these articles. Reading them, one sees queer immigrant experiences represented in a linear narrative: they all live in near constant fear in oppressive countries, they migrate with the hope of a better life to a country where they can express their sexuality freely and where they learn to come out of the closet, except maybe when they are with heterosexual (and presumed homophobic) immigrants. The following assertion illustrates this representation:

Ever-increasing numbers of them are willing to come out of isolation and fear. The globalization of communications makes an increasing number of them aware of places on our planet where they would no longer be pariahs. They have heard of countries that appear to them as the end of a clandestine life or of duplicity over their sexual orientation. Increasing numbers of them realize there may be another choice than compliance with the religious, familial, and moral prescriptions of their country. (Boullé, 2002: 68, 70, my translation)

This narrative implies that a true homosexual must come out of the closet and live his or her sexual orientation publicly. The possibility of the closet being a contextually agentic site for queers of colour (Decena, 2008; Fisher, 2003) is barely mentioned and is never explained. A normal ‘out’ gay subject is legitimated and valued over other sexual expressions; the ‘in’ queer immigrant, through his or her erasure, appears as an abject being who has failed his or her liberation through migration. Only once, briefly, is the possibility of not wanting to come out positively mentioned: ‘We will also try to learn if they want to be visible. Is coming out important in their culture?’ (Vaillancourt, 2009: 56, my translation). In most articles, even if it is recognized that it may take time, their coming out is expected: ‘They arrive in Canada knowing that the society is more tolerant, but they have to learn to assert themselves as gays and this takes time’ (Boullé, 2000: 54, my translation). The old teleology of ‘coming out’ is never really questioned and the impact of racism and discrimination that queers of colour face as immigrants is barely taken into account to understand their experiences. In the end, these experiences appear to be over-determined by homophobia among ethnic and racial minorities and in countries of the South.

In spite of this rather selective coverage, it must be said that representations of queer immigrants are much less stereotypical than what has been observed elsewhere (Han, 2008; Teunis, 2007). The objectification of the bodies of men of colour, though present on magazine covers, is absent in the articles of Québec’s gay magazines. Not a single one highlights or even insinuates the sexual ‘qualities’ of some men of colour, a result significantly differentiating Québec, not only from the USA and Australia, but also from France. In this latter country, the Arab male has historically been erased from or eroticized in gay culture and politics (Cervulle, 2008). In all, attention given to queer immigrants in Québec almost exclusively focuses on migratory experiences. Queer immigrants are mainly represented as active social actors confronted with oppression and multiple discriminations, but nonetheless able to assert themselves. This is particularly true in Fugues, where half the articles directly voice such sentiments in lengthy interviews and where the frame related to the ‘activities of queer immigrant organizations’ is the most frequent.

However, queer immigrants tend to be represented as passive subjects when texts correspond to the frames of ‘difficulties with immigration law and procedures’ and ‘persecution in countries of origin.’ In this last case, queer immigrants are largely portrayed as victims, as it is assumed that it is almost impossible to be queer in the South. Such a discourse implicitly associates gay immigration with liberation, and the act of migration thus becomes a proxy for coming out. Interestingly, this representation of subjugated beings, both in their country of origin and during their immigration process, contributes to the positive and empowering representation of the host society, where queers can be full and active social actors, in control of their life, and most of all, ‘out’ of the closet.

Conclusion

Homosexuality may have no borders, as was suggested by the 2009 theme of the International Day Against Homophobia, but the gay subject certainly has frontiers. These frontiers are characterized by the intersection and interaction of race, gender, age, physical appearance, and religion, to which we could add class (for an analysis of class normativity in gay magazines, see P Johnson, 2008; Sender, 2001). These frontiers are moreover not without consequences: the dominant representation of a gay subject effectively contributes to the definition of what is and should be the valued gay subject. In Québec, this subject is preferably ‘out’, White (or with a possibly light shade), mostly young, able-bodied and muscular. In line with Butler’s conception of performativity, this constant visual reiteration of gayness as whiteness constitutes a legitimizing space for an effectively constrained gay subject. As for the articles, their textual reiteration of a ‘coming out’ teleology and of an emancipatory migration plays the same role: the Québec gay subject appears as tolerant and open-minded, while queer immigrants appear as liberated beings learning to free themselves from the homophobia of their community of origin. Other beings who do not conform to these performative norms are marginalized, either as objects, reduced to some bodily or sexual characteristic on magazine covers, or as abject beings not even under consideration, in other words, contented queers in the South or ‘in’ queer immigrants in Québec. Even if the patterns of intersectional representation highlighted in my results indicate some differences between Québec’s context and other countries, it remains that Québec’s gay magazines are a significant cultural medium through which forms of ethnic exclusion and essentialism may be noted among gay men.

Through my articulation of Butler and Collins, I wanted to overcome possible shortcomings in both perspectives. While Butler tends to focus on sex and gender and may be said to neglect the importance of other axes of social differentiation for non-White non-middle-class persons (EP Johnson, 2001), intersectional theorization tends to focus on the social actor, neglecting its discursive constitution (Bilge, 2010; Staunæs, 2003). My analysis precisely highlights the intersectional complexity of subjectification processes in Québec’s gay magazines, putting forward how the proper ‘gay subject’ is not only gay, but also gendered, racialized, aged and so on. At the same time, a Butlerian understanding of this process foregrounds the importance of a form of genealogical discursive analysis: representations in gay magazines effectively contribute to the constitution of multiple and complex frontiers in social practices, not only among gay men, but also between gay men and immigrants.

Of course, this is only a partial critical discourse analysis that neither takes into account the production of these magazines nor their reception by queers of colour. Thus, I cannot conclude that queers of colour effectively feel objectified or abjectified in Québec’s context, as it is put forward by queers of colour in the USA (Han, 2008; Mercer and Julien, 1988; Perez, 2005; Teunis, 2007) and English-speaking Canada (Gosine, 2008; Moldes, 2009). Nonetheless, this analysis contributes to understanding the constitution of a desired gay subjectivity and of symbolic frontiers between gay men in Québec’s French-speaking community. My analysis shows the importance of paying special attention to how axes of differentiation interact. In the end, this allows us to see the complexities of power relations in gay communities, thus avoiding a descent into a ‘spiral of silence’, and thereby opening the possibilities for more appropriate politics intended to fight oppression and discrimination, without hiding inequalities that exist among queers.

Footnotes

Funding

I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada whose Joseph-Armand-Bombardier CGS doctoral scholarship funds my research project.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sirma Bilge for her critical comments as well as Paul Zanazanian for his linguistic help. I also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and challenging comments.

Notes

Olivier Roy is a PhD candidate in sociology at University of Montréal and research agent of the Intersectionality Research Unit of the Centre d'études ethniques des universités montréalaises. His doctoral research is concerned with queer immigrants' subjectification processes in Québec, in an intersectional perspective. His research interests are with the sociology of homosexualities, queer theory, and the intersectional approach as well as with symbolic interactionism.

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