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to a city (Ourahmoune and Nyeck, 2008) or started to spend most of their time there. Here, the contrast between the city and countryside, where the respondents felt constrained in their possibilities, becomes apparent.

 

A: You mentioned that you wanted to move to a bigger city, why was that?

 

B: I don’t know, I am just like that. A lot of people say “Listen Alex, you just belong to a big city”. In the village I was always the odd duck, and therefore I thought that I needed to go to a big city […] well and I was being looked at in an odd way. Particularly when you are not coming from a big city, where there are different people like you. And that is why I am feeling quite comfortable here.

The city liberates and provides freedom to act out one’s own identity and to consume products, such as non-traditional gender aesthetics, which would render the individual as the odd one out on the countryside. However, respondents also used non-traditional gender aesthetics to symbolize their transition from the rural area to the city and to establish a stark contrast to the rural social environment. Non-traditional gender aesthetics are used as a strong sign of a genuine urban lifestyle identity.

 

“For a country bumpkin, XXXX was a metropolis par excellence. Then it was also to show your friends from the countryside “look I have been to the city and I have become really city-like”, because I wear glittering clothes….”

Individual gender understanding

 

The responses concerning the gender understandings of the respondents supported the notions that male identity conceptions are currently changing drastically (Ourahmoune and Nyeck, 2008, Schroeder and Zwick, 2005). On a continuum contrasting of what the individual respondent connects with masculinity on the one hand and femininity on the other hand, informants rated themselves as being somewhere in between the masculine – feminine continuum. In describing themselves, respondents also referred to attributes which they used to describe femininity.

 

“Yes, well, probably something in between a bit. Yes, because, since I am not embodying what I consider as masculine, yes, well I am rather ... a bit androgynous.”

“Puh, I would say somewhere in between these two. Well in between these two, I don’t hope that I am appearing too feminine, but I also don’t feel the need to appear too masculine.…”

These findings also highlight that the respondents, gay and straight, do not have a problem to incorporate feminine traits into their self understanding. Heterosexual and homosexual males do equally not try to neglect them and spoke freely about aspects of their identity which 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。