Kane Race

‘Party and Play’: Online hook-up devices and the emergence of PNP practices among gay men:

This article situates online hook-up devices as an emergent infrastructure of the sexual encounter that has become popular among homosexually attracted men in urban centres. A focus on intimate infrastructures does two things. It draws attention to the material technologies, objects and environments that facilitate erotic encounters, casting these devices as active elements in the shaping of sexual practices. And it references how the different kinds of erotic attachments that people come to find necessary for their lives may be ignored if not actively degraded by hegemonic ‘institutions of intimacy’ without critical intervention (Berlant and Warner, 1998). Where institutions allocate resources and establish hierarchies of authority, infrastructures produce capacities and shape encounters in ways that become more or less durable and hardwired into the routines of everyday life. The article traces some of the new genres of sexual interaction afforded by online devices, with a focus on the significance of the concept of ‘play’ among participants. Such a focus enables an understanding of relations between sex and sociability that are being elaborated with these media, and it generates an approach to HIV prevention that promotes acknowledgement of how drug practices and other objects and devices participate in the construction of sexual encounters: their pleasures, qualities, risks and potentialities.

Speculative pragmatism and intimate arrangements: online hook-up devices in gay life

This paper considers how certain functions of online hook-up devices are participating in the emergence of new forms of sexual relation, new distributions of intimacy and new sexual arrangements. Though not without precedent, it argues that online hook-up devices generally act in gay culture as ‘framing devices’, framing sex as a ‘no-strings’ encounter via their default application. These frames are variously rejected, reconfigured, re-embedded or confounded by participants; they become subject to various forms of overflowing. Understanding this dynamic, its typical forms of connection and estrangement, is pivotal for grasping the emergence of new forms of sexual community and new sexual publics among gay men – and/or ‘un-community’, as some have put it. My analysis prompts a series of methodological reflections wrought from the encounter it stages between queer theory and Science and Technology Studies. At a time when marriage and monogamy are increasingly monopolising the public discourse of gay life, digital devices are affording novel ways of arranging sex, intimacy and sexual community, with their own qualities and limitations.

HIV Health in Context: Negotiating Medical Technology and Lived Experience

Biomedical constructions of health and illness as objective categories have long been challenged by social theorists. As part of this critique, an analytic distinction is made between the domains of doctors and patients to highlight differences in perspective and power. Illness narratives and phenomenological studies foreground how patient experiences and understandings of health are complex, socially embedded and often conflict with medical models. This article, however, asks how patients make sense of their health at the interface of these domains. This question is explored with reference to 16 men living with HIV and the ways in which they negotiate medical discourse and technology in relation to lived experience and, conversely, how they interpret their own bodily symptoms in light of clinical construction of health. These negotiations contest the authority of biomedical definitions, but also reveal a more dynamic and technologically mediated negotiation within patient experience than some phenomenologically oriented theories on health allow.

Framing responsibility: HIV, biomedical prevention, and the performativity of the law.

How can we register the participation of a range of elements, extending beyond the human subject, in the production of HIV events? In the context of proposals around biomedical prevention, there is a growing awareness of the need to find ways of responding to complexity, as everywhere new combinations of treatment, behavior, drugs, norms, meanings and devices are coming into encounter with one another, or are set to come into encounter with one another, with a range of unpredictable effects. In this paper I consider the operation of various framing devices that attribute responsibility and causation with regard to HIV events. I propose that we need to sharpen our analytic focus on what these devices do, their performativity—that is, their full range of worldly implications and effects. My primary examples are the criminal law and the randomized control trial. I argue that these institutions operate as framing devices: They attribute responsibility for HIV events and externalize other elements and effects in the process. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies as well as queer theory, I set out an analytic frame that marks out a new role for HIV social research. Attentiveness to the performative effects of these devices is crucial, I suggest, if we want better to address the global HIV epidemic.

Complex Events: Drug Effects and Emergent Causality

This article works with Connollys (2004) concept of “emergent causality” to counter the insistence on linear expressions of cause and effect in dominant strands of drug prevention evaluation. I elaborate this concept with reference to recent controversies concerning the policing of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. The use of sniffer dogs to furnish the reasonable suspicion required to authorize police “stop and search” procedures has been a key part of this controversy. Substantiated in terms of its universal applicability, high visibility and purported deterrent effect, this practice actually forms part of the complex and evolving environment in which new and more dangerous forms of sex-related drug consumption have emerged. Emergent causality makes it possible to see how any element in a given assemblage can acquire contingent agentic capacities. Grasping these developments as events, or processes of eventuation, sets out an active, engaged and agonistic role for research practice.

The future of drugs: recreational drug use and sexual health among gay and other men who have sex with men

There are complex historical connections between sexual minoritisation and desires to chemically alter bodily experience. For gay men, drug and alcohol use can be a creative or experimental response to social marginalisation - and not necessarily a problematic one in every instance. Numerous studies have found that infection with HIV and other sexually transmissible infections (STIs) is more likely among gay and men who have sex with men (MSM) who use recreational drugs than those who do not, but the causal nature of these relations is uncertain. Sexualised drug use is associated with a range of other problems, including dependence, mental health issues, accident and overdose. A growing body of work in the Alcohol and Other Drugs (AOD) field demonstrates the action of drugs and their purported effects to be a product of their relations with various other actors, contexts and practices. Given these contingencies, it is impossible to predict the future of drugs or their effect on the sexual health of gay and MSM with any degree of certainty. This article outlines some of the conditions most likely to mediate such futures in the medium term. Public funding for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer drug issues should not remain restricted to questions of HIV prevention and sexual health. It should be expanded to equip sexual health and AOD service providers with the cultural and sexual literacy to mitigate stigma and allow them to respond constructively to drug problems among sexual and gender minorities as a matter of priority.

‘Frequent Sipping’: Bottled Water, the Will to Health and the Subject of Hydration

This article examines how the formation of markets in bottled water has relied on assembling a particular subject: the subject of hydration. The discourse of hydration is a conspicuous feature of efforts to market bottled water, allowing companies to appeal to scientifically framed principles and ideas of health in order to position the product as an essential component in self-health and healthy lifestyles. Alongside related principles, such as the ‘8 × 8 rule’, hydration has done much to establish new practices of water drinking and consumption in which the consumer appears to be always at risk of dehydration and must engage in practices of ‘frequent sipping’. This article traces the emergence of the concept of hydration from its origins in exercise science and explores its circulation, contemporary uses and purchase. I argue that the appeal to biomedical languages and concepts found in the discourse of hydration connects with much broader ways of conceiving and acting upon the self that have become prevalent in contemporary society – what Rose and Novas call ‘biological citizenship’ – indicating how the ensemble of hydration participates in wider-ranging transformations in forms of rule. The story of hydration reveals how biomedical techniques of the self can be made to double up as ‘market devices’ by offering specific procedures for assessing the self and calculating the body’s needs. In order to grasp these developments, I position the health sciences, and health and fitness in particular, as a potent site of popular culture in which bodies learn to be affected by the procedures of scientific experiment. A critical grasp of this context is best enabled, I argue, by situating the producers and consumers of scientific principles and commercial products as embodied and looking at their interconnection in processes of emergence. Through these means, we can begin to develop a fully materialized account of the question: how have we become so thirsty?

Reluctant Objects Sexual Pleasure as a Problem for HIV Biomedical Prevention

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has so far emerged as a reluctant object in much gay community discourse, primarily because of its association with the supposed excesses of unbridled sex. Its approval in the United States sparked bitter debate and a new round of sexual health moralism issuing mainly from gay community-based commentators, with initial uptake much slower than expected. This article considers early gay community responses to PrEP and connects them to the failure of existing HIV scientific practices to produce inhabitable sexual pedagogies. The controversy surrounding PrEP speaks to how condoms have been a way to manage communal fears about sexual excess in the era of AIDS, providing not only a latex barrier but also symbolic reassurance that gay sex might in some way be made “safe.” Another mode of attending to what is risky and exciting about sexual and scientific encounters might be possible in conceiving them as events.

Engaging in a Culture of Barebacking: Gay Men and the Risk of HIV Prevention

In his book Autopornography, the HIV-positive gay pornstar, writer and sex advocate Scott O’Hara gives a frank and amiable account of his sexual experience during the first phase of the AIDS epidemic in North America (O’Hara, 1997a). He describes periods of abstinence, of limiting his sexual practice to certain acts (both alone and with particular partners), of using condoms for anal sex (on one occasion he describes this as ‘kinky’ and ‘hot’) and also of unprotected sex. He describes times when he had no libido at all, some of which coincide with periods of illness, and he describes a time after 1994 when his libido returns, when he realises ‘there were other HIVers out there with whom I didn’t need to worry about transmission; men who didn’t worry about isolating bodily fluids’ (1997a: 129). Despite his upfront sexual manner and sexual articulacy, O’Hara relates how he found it difficult to raise the subject of AIDS with potential sex partners, such that he’d ‘essentially given up sex rather than learn[ed] to discuss it’ (1997a: 127). In 1994, he gets an ‘HIV+’ tattoo on his left bicep (which he refers to as the most visible spot on his body save his forehead) and surrounds it with a ‘tasteful little circlet of swimming spermatozoa’. These steps are taken in an attempt to ensure that the sex he has is safe or at least better informed with respect to HIV transmission. For example, on one occasion he describes a sexual encounter with a ‘redneck’ where he avoids doing anything risky (even oral sex) because it is too dark to see his tattoo. He suggests they jerk each other off in a scene he describes as ‘really exciting’ (1997a: 200).

Gay men's perceptions of sexually transmissible infections and their experiences of diagnosis: 'part of the way of life' to feeling 'dirty and ashamed'

BACKGROUND Gay men are considerably more likely than their heterosexual peers to be diagnosed with a sexually transmissible infection (STI), yet relatively little has been published on gay mens perceptions of STIs other than HIV. METHODS Drawing on interviews conducted with Sydney gay men, we analysed perceptions of STIs, and mens experiences of testing and diagnosis. RESULTS Over half the men in the study had ever been diagnosed with an STI. STIs were generally regarded as inconvenient consequences of sexual activity. Viral, recurring STIs were viewed as being more serious than curable, bacterial STIs. However, all STIs were considered as considerably less important than HIV. Condom use and regular STI testing were the most commonly used strategies to manage the risk of STIs. Despite the relative lack of concern attributed to STIs, being diagnosed with an STI could generate feelings of shame, embarrassment and annoyance. For some men, education campaigns appeared to have helped destigmatise STIs and encourage regular testing. CONCLUSIONS We believe that to maintain high rates of STI testing among gay men, community education efforts should continue to reduce the stigma associated with STIs and greater support should be offered to gay men when they receive an STI diagnosis.