Bodies and Boundaries of UK Bear Spaces

Abstract

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.