I’ve never ever felt like that in my life before … never ever felt that intense: penetration of the male body as transformative experience

Abstract

This paper explores the sexual penetration of the heterosexually identifying male body as transformative experience in terms of masculine subjectivity. It draws from the work of Eve Sedgwick and other queer theorists who have argued that gender, sexuality and desire are constituted through multiple social discourses and that by pushing the limits of taken for granted binarisms such as the hetero/homosexual definition new meanings and subjectivities become possible. Football as a masculine and masculinising practice is presented as containing homosexual subtexts that allude to possibilities of desire. Interview transcripts from heterosexually identifying men who have sex with men are also provided to illustrate the transformative power of the experience of being sexually penetrated. The conclusion from this work is that what separates heterosexuality from homosexuality is not desire but is homophobia understood as the fear of being constituted as homosexual within hegemonic masculine discourses in which homosexuality is culturally excluded.