Bear Studies
From Homolexis Glossary
Recent years have seen the tentative emergence of a fledgling academic discipline called Bear Studies. A number of scholars are exploring the increasingly visible subculture of ursine gay guys and their admirers. These scholars point to the fact that self-identified bears have created a kind of counterculture, with its own language, values and rituals.
The Papa Bear of the field is Les K. Wright, a retired professor and San Francisco-based founder of the Bear History Project. In 1997 Wright edited The Bear Book Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture. That volume was such a success among students of bear culture that it was followed by The Bear Book II (2001). Wright and his fellow scholars draw on such theoretical academic disciplines as masculinity studies, cultural studies, gender and queer theory and eco-criticism.
In an essay titled "Theoretical Bears," Wright argues that bears can be "both masculine and feminine, strong and sensitive, gruff and affectionate, independent-minded and nurturing." Such views strike a utopian note.
John Edward Campbell is the author of "Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality and Embodied Identity," an ethnographic study of social scenes in the Internet. "When I began my work in media studies, all the research on the Web concerned straight white guys," Campbell said. "But my own experience of this world was radically different. My research looked at communities of masculine-identified-bears, a group that has exploded on the Internet, a phenomenon that no one had really looked at before."
Some bear theorists compare their scholarship to that of insurgent feminists twenty years ago, who in such polemics as "Fat Is a Feminist Issue" and "The Beauty Myth" assessed the toll that society’s premium on physical perfection takes on the individual. The same standards oppress gay men, bear scholars claim.
The tentative emergence of Bear Studies is a sign of the success of the “branding” of the bear label. Ever since the days of Walt Whitman America had known gay men of this kind, but the label and Wright’s books served as invaluable recruiting devices. Men who had been bears, in effect, for most of their lives found that they were members of a community.
There is an analogy with the label beatnik. During mid-twentieth century America, the inner cities contained pockets of “bohemians,” low-income dropouts who prefer to pursue personal lifestyle issues instead of conforming to the norms of corporate America. It took the invention of the word beatnik in 1958 turned this backwater phenomenon into a mass movement. As with the Bear phenomenon, the label and the population worked synergetically. “Rebranding” alone would not do the job
