Intimacy, norm and difference: gay modernity in Lisbon

Abstract

The article discusses the findings of an ethnographical investigation of Lisbon's gay milieu, testing the heuristic potential of the notion of marginality as a product of the permanent negotiating of hegemony in societies. What is in question here is an understanding of the complexity of the activated symbolic mechanisms: how a fringe position can be re-centred through the reconstruction of fringes and the reinforcement of the centre itself.