While in the contemporary period condoms are considered to play a key role in preventing HIV and STI transmissions, this cultural object is also considered to stigmatise certain social groups and threaten normative gender identities, especially for white heterosexual men. For instance, post-AIDS the object of the condom in the discourse of safer (hetero)sex is understood to inscribe heterosexual women’s bodies as risky and contaminating while simultaneously positioning heterosexual men as free from such corporeal internalisations (Waldby 1996). Moreover, for heterosexual men, condom use is often seen as a curtailment of the male sex drive and as a threat to the constitution of a heterosexual male body-image (see Kimmel and Levine 1992; Segal 1990; Patton 1994; Waldby 1996).
Vitellone (2000, 2002) highlights how these understandings of the object of the condom as signifying ‘the other’ in AIDS heterosexual culture are also pervasive in empirical studies of safer heterosex practice.
In addressing these empirical findings Vitellone (2002), however, calls into question the dominant interpretation of the condom as concerning the figuring of women’s bodies as contaminating and an ‘absent,’ ‘invisible’ and ‘unmarked’ heterosexual male body. Such research findings, she suggests, are illustrative not of the constitution of ‘the other’ but of the configuration of a masculine self-image and a heterosexual self-identity, one that takes place through the prosthetic object of the condom (Vitellone 2002). Vitellone further suggests that interpretations of the condom as curtailing the male sex drive and threatening a masculine self-identity (for heterosexual men) take for granted the way in which the object of the condom is itself constitutive of hydraulic male sexuality (Vitellone 2000).
This is the complete article, containing 267 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
