Consuming chavs: The ambiguous politics of gay chavinism

Paul Johnson s (2008) article Rude Boys , published in an earlier issue of Sociology, scrutinizes critically the commodification of the male chav for consumption by middle-class homosexual men. This phenomenon, which Andrew Fraser (2005) calls chavinism , takes a number of different forms: pornography, sex lines, club nights etc. In part as a response to Johnson s arguments concerning the ways in which chavinism further devalue[s] the individuals and groups it depicts, creating a form of symbolic violence (2008: 67), our article speculates further on the ambiguous implications of this minority consumer culture. To do this, we develop Connell s (1992, 2002; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005) concept of hegemonic masculinity to discuss what gay chavinism might mean for hegemonic homosexuality .