“I truly respect my tears, but even more my laughs”: fashion artifacts, identification processes and style construction of gay Bear fashion style in Recife

Abstract

In the middle of the vast possibilities of being in gay universe, a special sub-culture stands out: Bears. Deriving from the 1980’s, from the city of San Francisco (California), this group has the reframe (with consequent valorization) of body fat and facial and corporeal hair, and homosexuality, with hyper masculine performativity, as its strongest characteristics (Domingos, 2010; Hennen, 2008). The claim of the “original macho man” image is stimulated by the consumption of some specific fashion artifacts that give them certain “free pass” in both straight and gay spaces. Using ethnography and comprehensive interview, associated to a high range of bibliographic research, with posterior content analysis, and having the city of Recife-PE as a scenery, it was possible to reach to the concept of “transitability”; to the causal relationship between Bear identification processes and physical and symbolic violence suffered in childhood; to the ritual processes of consumption of some fashion artifacts; to the anxiety/fear of the scrutiny among other bears when it comes to the wrong choice of a garment to any Bear events.