Uneven Vulnerability
Uneven Vulnerability
Queer Hypervisibility and Spaces of Imprisonment
This chapter shows how incarcerated gay men present prisons as spaces of exposure and seek to disorder the governing logics that enable acts of exposure, which derive from surveillance. Gay men’s experience of incarceration is one of hypervisibility, meaning that their visibility consists of multiple layers and is differentiated because of the perceptions of their bodies and their desires. This enhanced visibility magnifies the general vulnerability associated with detention. The chapter explores edited collections of writing alongside memoirs by gay men in prison to show how same-sex desire is used as a way to refuse queer vulnerability, to undermine notions of Black masculinity as rooted in the concept of the “cool pose,” and to rewrite familiar scripts about male prison rape and HIV/AIDS concerns.
Keywords: prison, visibility, hypervisibility, surveillance, masculinity, memoir, cool pose, rape, HIV/AIDS
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