Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.
Chapter

Chapter
Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies How to Have Sex without Women or Men
DOI link for Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies How to Have Sex without Women or Men
Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies How to Have Sex without Women or Men book
Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies How to Have Sex without Women or Men
DOI link for Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies How to Have Sex without Women or Men
Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies How to Have Sex without Women or Men book
ABSTRACT
Contemporary queer theory sees gender as a regulatory construct, a site of shifting power relations. Although queer theorists have made many claims about the power of queerly gendered bodies and performativities to disrupt enforced normative sex/gender systems, theory lags far behind community discourses here. In sexual-minority communities, such as queer leather communities, there are rich and subtly nuanced discourses of gendered pleasure, practice, desire, and subjectivity. These community discourses sometimes reflect rich and subtly nuanced embodiments of gender that resist and exceed any simple categorization into female, male, woman, man, and thus into homosexual bisexual or heterosexual. 1 Further, queer theory has tended to neglect "the implications of an enforced sex/gender system for people who live outside it," as Ki Namaste has argued with regard to queer theory's erasure of transgendered subjectivity.2 When transgendered subjects participate in minority communities organized around radical sexual practice, new and theoretically interesting configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality arise. In this paper, I will theorize the genderings of U.S. leatherdyke boys and their leatherdyke daddies. I am especially concerned to explore how leatherdyke genderplay functions as a means for gender interrogation, solidification, resistance, destabilization, and reconfiguration. From this
investigation, I will draw some tentative conclusions about multiple gender statuses already available in the United States.