Gay diapers

Hi everyone:) I'm a gay, diaper lover who struggles to accept his diaper lover side. I've been a DL since forever and I've always dreamt of wearing diapers. He already knew the answer because there in the doorway was his son holding a large disposable diaper. Dan grinned, "Maxi pads aren't enough anymore, so I'm gonna have to put you back in diapers to keep you dry.". When Sam's parents have to go away for a few days, Sam will go to Nathan's house, but he will discover that discipline and authority are not of the same register as at home.

He will also discover that Nathan wets the bed and has to wear diapers. But does he only wear it at night? Not so sure And Sam, will he have to wear one too?. AB/DL people may either call themselves Adult Babies, meaning they like roleplaying as a baby, which is called “age play;” or Diaper Lovers, meaning they enjoy the feeling of wearing or using. I recently informed by a close gay friend (bottom) that after doing the proverbial deed, gay men often wear diapers due to leakage.

I'm not judging or joking but I can't get this question out of my mind. Cite As: Friend, Juliana. This decentering lends insight into the reification of homo sexuality as a politically potent force for establishing and reinforcing the contours of citizenship. Ultimately, Meiu encourages us to expand our understanding of belonging and exclusion by attending closely to objects that, at first glance, may not seem to warrant close attention.

Juliana Friend: You mention that some of your Kenyan interlocutors were skeptical about your choice to research discourses about diapers. Some tried to point your ethnographic attention elsewhere. How did you respond to these reactions? George Paul Meiu: I remember vividly talking with two public health workers in , in Mtwapa, Kenya. Both men identified as gay. They began laughing profusely.

They were laughing so hard that I started laughing with them. In fact, they later shared many such rumors with me. Rumors about diapers, of all things. It is, in part, this expectation that sustains their efficiency as means for disciplining desire. It is important to remember that the reification of any normative framework—say, of intimate citizenship, for example—depends on and is constituted by the things it disavows as shameful, unserious, or perverse.

To be sure, a sensationalizing focus on objects such as diapers may easily undermine a politics of respectability that seeks to counter older colonial paradigms of racialized sexuality, a risk I take very seriously. So, it is important to experiment with modes of writing and analysis that foreclose such potential Othering effects and sensationalist imaginaries, while attending very seriously to how autochthonous utopias of a national hetero sexuality are currently produced.

The critical question for me then should not concern that one looks at a particular undignified thing, but how and why one does so. After all, the two public health workers I talked to that day were themselves working hard to educate the local population about MSM issues. So, at the end of our conversation, we agreed that such rumors do require careful attention precisely because they are oppressive. And, along the way, we had also enjoyed a good laugh.

And so, to make the homosexual body a more stable target of outrage and violence in the collective imagination, leaders, media, civil society groups, and citizens often deploy a vast set of unlikely objects. Objects such as diapers might appear trivial to the violent politics of homophobia. Quite the contrary: their poetic deployment in rumor and political rhetoric informs the construction of the homosexual body as a target of repudiation.

In other words, at particular moments in time, such objects facilitate the displacement of desires, fears, and anxieties over the changing meanings of work, wealth, the body, and kinship, and mobilize them in opposition to, say, the homosexual. I could, of course, give you a whole list of objects I explore in my book, but, without some explanation for each, that list would not make much sense.

So, instead, let me offer just one other example of such queer objects: plastics. I am exploring these kinds of objects in a recent article in American Anthropologist Meiu JF: There is such a rich, longstanding body of anthropological scholarship on secrecy and concealment in Africa.

He already knew the answer

There is very important work, for example, on how, in African contexts, secrecy imbues the sexual with a particular kind of power. This power is less akin to what Foucault meant by this term and closer to a spiritual concentration of energy—fertility, life force, a certain vital exuberance—that people can mobilize for various purposes. This has, if anything, intensified as of late and found expression in new technologies and new forms of commodity consumption and self-making.

But what I am interested in here is less the secret of a veiled intimacy or even of illicit forms of moneymaking. I am rather interested in the act of the exposure of the secret as such.