Viral sex and the politics of life

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 107, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 265-285

  Tomso, Gregory ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 58849163826     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2007-066     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. Barebacking: intentional unprotected anal sex between two men. Bug chasing: intentional unprotected anal sex performed in order to become infected with HIV. Gift giving: intentional unprotected anal sex performed in order to infect another person with HIV. Virus breeding: the deliberate sexual exchange of HIV between men. Tweaking: using crystal methamphetamine, which many see as contributing to unsafe sex among gay men. For more on these practices, see Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming)
2. Perry N. Halkitis et al., Barebacking: Psychosocial and Public Health Approaches (Binghamton, NY: Haworth, 2006)
3. David M. Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007)
4. Dave Holmes, Patrick O'Byme, and Denise Gastaldo, "Raw Sex as Limit Experience: A Foucauldian Analysis of Unsafe Anal Sex between Men," Social Theory and Health 4.4 (2006): 319-33
5. David A. Mosko-witz and Michael E. Roloff, "The Existence of a Bug Chasing Subculture," Culture, Health, and Sexuality 9.4 (2007): 347-57
6. Frank Sanello, Tweakers: How Crystal Meth Is Ravaging Gay America (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2005)
7. Michael Shernoff, Without Condoms: Unprotected Sex, Gay Men, and Barebacking (New York: Routledge, 2005)
8. and Gregory Tomso, "Barebacking, Bug Chasing, and the Risks of Care," Literature and Medicine 23 (Spring 2004): 88-III
9. See Larry Kramer, The Tragedy of Today's Gays (New York: Tarcher, 2005)
10. Dan Savage, "Bug Chasers," Savage Love, The Stranger (Seattle), January 30, 2003, www.thestranger .com/seattle/SavageLoveoid=13241
11. Gregory A. Freeman, "In Search of Death," Rolling Stone, February 6, 2003, 44-48
12. and The Gift, written and directed by Louise Hogarth (Los Angeles: Dream Out Loud Productions, 2000)
13. I am not the first to use the phrase "viral sex." Most notably, it is the title of a book by Jaap Gaudsmit, Viral Sex: The Nature of AIDS (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). I take up the phrase in a different context here
14. See, for example, Barry D. Adam et al., "AIDS Optimism, Condom Fatigue, or Self-Esteem Explaining Unsafe Sex among Gay and Bisexual Men," Journal of Sex Research 42.3 (2005): 238-48
15. Mark Davis, "HIV Prevention Rationalities and Serostatus in the Risk Narratives of Gay Men," Sexualities 5.3 (2002): 282-99
16. Perry N. Halkitis and J. T. Parsons, "Intentional Unsafe Sex (Barebacking) among HIV-Positive Gay Men Who Seek Sexual Partners on the Internet," AIDS Care 15.3 (2003): 367-78
17. Susan Kippax and Kane Race, "Sustaining Safe Practice: Twenty Years On," Social Science and Medicine 57 (2003): 1-12
18. Kane D. Race, "Revaluation of Risk among Gay Men," AIDS Education and Prevention 15 (2003): 4369-81
19. Damien Thomas Ridge, "'It Was an Incredible Thrill': The Social Meanings and Dynamics of Younger Gay Men's Experiences of Barebacking in Melbourne," Sexualities 7.3 (2004): 259-79
20. and Nicolas Sheon and G. Michael Crosby, "Ambivalent Tales of HIV Disclosure in San Francisco," Social Science and Medicine 58 (2004): 2105-18
21. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (London: University College London Press, 1996), 1
22. Michel Foucault, "The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom," in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 281-301
23. Bareback.com, www.bareback.com (accessed August 3, 2007)
24. The phrase is the title of a book by Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal (New York: Vintage, 1996)
25. As Wendy Brown defines it, neoliberalism is a political rationality that "while foregrounding the market, is not only or even primarily focused on the economy." Rather, "it Involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market remains a distinctive player." Brown, "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy," in Edgework Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 39-40
26. For more on neoliberalism, see Michel Foucault, "The Birth of Biopolitics," in Ethics, 73-80, esp. 74
27. (This reference is to Foucault's summary of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1979. The full English translation of the lectures on biopolitics has not yet appeared but is forthcoming by Palgrave Macmillan.) For the full version of the lectures in French, see Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France (1978-1979) (Paris: Gallimard and Seuil, 2004)
28. For a useful and readily accessible English overview of these lectures, see Thomas Lemke, "'The Birth of Biopolitics': Michel Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France on Neo-liberal Governmentality," Economy and Society 30.2 (2001): 190-207
29. For more on neoliberalism, see Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Identity (Boston: Beacon, 2003)
30. and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)
31. Erick Eckholm, "Medicaid Plan Prods Patients toward Health," New York Times, December I, 2006
32. For a further elaboration of this point, see Adam et al., "AIDS Optimism, Condom Fatigue, or Self-Esteem"
33. and Davis, "HIV Prevention Rationalities."
34. See also Deborah Lupton, ed., Risk and Sociocultural Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially the essay by Mitchell Dean, "Risk, Calculable and Incalculable," 131-59
35. and Alan Petersen and Robin Bunton, eds., Foucault, Health and Medicine (New York: Routledge, 1997)
36. In his 1979 "The Birth of Biopolitics" lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault explores a fundamental tension between "reason of state" and liberalism. One, he says, has always "haunted" the other (79)
37. While liberalism presupposes that government always "governs too much," the rationale of "reason of state" advocates strengthening the state through forms of govemmentality that require both growth and more intensive regulation in regard to issues of population (74). Foucault, "The Birth of Biopolitics."
38. For a detailed analysis of the "new" (versus traditional) public health, see Alan Petersen and Deborah Lupton, The New Public Health: Health and Self in the Age of Risk (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997)
39. See also Alan Petersen, "Risk, Governance, and the New Public Health," in Petersen and Bunton, Foucault, Health and Medicine, 189-206
40. On the rebuilding of gay sexual culture, see Eric Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe: Cay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (New York: Haworth, 1998)
41. The phrase is also the title of a book by Simon Watney, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
42. See also Foucault, "The Ethics of the Concern for Self," 284
43. "BB Bottom seeking tops to breed my ass. Anonymous scene cool," personal ad, Men Seeking Men, Craigslist San Francisco Bay Area, http://sfbay.craigslist.org/cgi-bin/ personals.cgicategory=m4m, posting ID 385782984 30 July 2007, 9:31 p.m. PDT (accessed August 1, 2007)
44. For the standard explanation of gift economies, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000)
45. For an application of Mauss's thinking to online cultures of viral sex, see Michael Graydon, "Don't Bother to Wrap It: Online Giftgiver and Bugchaser Newsgroups, the Social Impact of Gift Exchanges, and the 'Carnivalesque,'" Culture, Health, and Sexuality 9.3 (2007): 277-92
46. Linda Singer, Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic (New York: Routledge, 1992). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number
47. This is also an example of what Paula Treichler describes as the "epidemic of signification" characteristic of AIDS. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)
48. Judith Butler, introduction to Singer, Erotic Welfare, 7
49. David Halperin, Saint Foucault (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 88, 90
50. Ridge, "'It Was an Incredible Thrill,'" 266
51. Michel Foucault, "Social Triumph of the Sexual Will," in Ethics, 157-62, 160. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as "Triumph."
52. Foucault, "Friendship," 138
53. Michel Foucault, "Sexual Choice, Sexual Act," in Ethics, 141-56, 143
54. The phrase is a title of a book by Bruce Bawer, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994)
55. I am extending here Barry et al.'s claim that freedom, in the Foucauldian sense, is a "formula of rule." See Barry, Osborne, and Rose, Foucault and Political Reason, 8
56. Eric Rofes, Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic (New York: Haworth, 1996), 164, 196
57. These basic responses are an updated version of the logic that, according to Cindy Patton, underwrote first-wave safe-sex education campaigns that identified members of "risk groups" (gays, intravenous drug users, etc.) as opposed to an undifferentiated "everybody else." Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). One problem with this way of thinking is that it perpetuates a specific form of epistemological violence that, in its need to identify those at risk, discursively produces sexual subjects who, by definition, are categorically different from the undifferentiated subjects who occupy the political center
58. This argument has been made by Nikolas Rose, from whom I take the term vital politics. See Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)
59. George W. Bush, "National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2006: A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America," January 20,2006, www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2006/01/20060120-5.html
60. and George W. Bush, "Remarks by the President at Dedication of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center," March 22, 2001, www.whitehouse .gov/news/releases/2001/03/20010322-14.html. I am indebted to Troy Urquhart, a participant in a spring 2006 seminar on poststructuralism and sexuality that I taught at the University of West Florida, for these sources and for alerting me to Bush's use of the phrase "culture of life."
61. Tim Golden, "Tough U.S. Steps in Hunger Strike at Camp in Cuba," New York Times, February 9, 2006
62. Bush, "National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2006"
63. and Bush, "Remarks by the President at Dedication of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center."
64. For more on the notion of bare life, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)
65. See Douglas Crimp, "Melancholia and Moralism: An Introduction," in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 1-26
66. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990)
67. It is for such reasons that Foucault could argue that the rise of biopolitics is closely linked with the advent of capitalism: "Bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes." Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 140-41
68. The phrase comes from Butler, introduction to Singer, Erotic Welfare, 3