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Passion's re-territorializations: Mapping the mixed semiotics of unsafe homo passional assemblages
Abstract
This paper conducts a mixed semiotics of unsafe homo passional assemblages. It begins with an exposition of Deleuze and Guattari's instructions for mapping the multidimensional circuitry of assemblages along the generative and transformative poles. Unsafe sex is a line of desiring movement involving expressive matter from the pick-up machine. After HIV/AIDS, the pick-up machine's de-territorialised movements have been problematised, their a-semiotic matter becoming a testimony to the limits of the imperative to practice safe sex. These assemblages have been overcoded as being unconscious and ineffable; however, this paper traces their mixed semiotics involving the a-signifying particle-signs of the pick-up machine as well as conscious lines of desiring movement involving the segmentarity and mirror vision of a recognisable social identity as a gay man. In all of these passional assemblages the pick-up machine's nomadic movements have become buckled by a number of sovereign, consuming microfascisms. The lines of movement have reached their threshold limit, weakening their capacity for making new connections for new lines of becoming and creative mutation. Throughout the paper it is argued that the macropolitics of safe sex has failed to grasp the possibilities for new passages that can be drawn from the molecular soup of the pick-up machine and its micropolitics of perception, affection and conversation. It is not necessary to prohibit its lines of movement as new possibilities for homo sexual culture will emerge by drawing on affective potentials drawn from the pick-up machine in conjunction with new affective material.
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Anal intercourse between men is discussed using various texts, primarily interview narratives. The focus is upon the way men talk about and experience anal intercourse as a relation of power between men. Drawing upon the work of Foucault, a distinction is made between power as domination and power as negotiated between people. The latter opens up the possibility of intimacy and mutual pleasure within fantasies of domination and submission. Some of the men's narratives embraced the idea that the anally insertive partner dominated the receptive partner. Others resisted such an understanding by drawing upon the concepts of `versatility', `getting on top', `sex is not about power' and `active passivity'. It is argued in the article that such resistant practices redistribute power from the insertor to the insertee rather than eliminate power in sex, and this argument is supported through Norbert Elias's concept of power chances. The idea that the receptive partner in anal intercourse is `vulnerable' is discussed with reference to how the practice is structured historically, linguistically and corporeally.
This study was undertaken to assess the frequency with which gay and bisexual men in New York City engage in intentional unprotected anal sex, or "barebacking," and to examine explanations about the emergence of barebacking. A total of 518 men completed a brief intercept survey. Of the 448 men who were familiar with the term "barebacking" 204 (45.5%) reported bareback sex in the past 3 months prior to assessment. HIV seropositive men were significantly more likely than HIV seronegative men to report this behavior and reported significantly more sexual partners with which they had engaged in intentional unprotected anal intercourse. Participants reported significantly more acts of seroconcordant bareback sex (intentional unprotected anal intercourse with a partner of the same HIV status) than those of serodiscordant bareback sex. Men who reported barebacking also reported significantly more benefits associated with this behavior. The Internet and the availability of sexually oriented chat rooms, HIV treatment advances, emotional fatigue regarding HIV, and the increased popularity of "club" drugs were commonly cited as reasons for the barebacking phenomenon.
While unsafe sex has been reported throughout the HIV epidemic, the underlying assumption has been that most persons do not seek to purposely ham unprotected sex. Within the gay community, the term 'barebacking' has emerged to refer to intentional unsafe anal sex. The prevalence of barebacking is evidenced among gay men, particularly those who are HIV-positive, by the number of internet sites devoted to barebacking and the number of men seeking sexual partners through the use of the internet. To gain insight into barebacking, a sample of 112 HIV-positive gay men were recruited from internet sites where men seek to meet each other for sex. The major it of participants (84%)reported engaging in barebacking in the past three months, and 43% of the men reported recent bareback sex with a partner of unknown serostatus. These results indicate the potential for widespread transmission of HIV to uninfected men by the partners they meet on the internet. Analyses revealed that men who reported bareback sex only with HIV-positive partners scored lower in sexual adventurism than those who had bareback sex regardless of partner serostatus. A significant correlation was observed between defining masculinity as sexual prowess and intentional unprotected anal sex. There are serious implications for HIV prevention efforts, in that internet-based education should be a priority in order to reach men who rely on this mechanism to find sexual partners.
Interpretation of the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative work as it applies to the social sciences and earth sciences, in particular geography. Utilizes the framework of non-lieanr dynamics (complexity theory). Includes a case study.
We live in an ever-fragmenting society, in which distinctions between culture and nature, biology and politics, law and transgression, mobility and immobility, reality and representation, seem to be disappearing. This book demonstrates the hidden logic beneath this process, which is also the logic of 'the camp'. Social theory has traditionally interpreted the camp as an anomaly, as an exceptional site situated on the margins of society, aiming to neutralize its 'failed citizens' and 'enemies'. However, in contemporary society, 'the camp' has now become the rule and consequently a new interrogation of its logic is necessary. In this exceptional volume, the authors explore the paradox of the camp, as representing both an old fear of enclosure and a new dream of belonging. They illustrate their arguments by drawing on contemporary sites of exemption - such as refugee camps, rape camps and favelas - as well as sites of self-exemption including gated communities, party tourism and celebrity cultures. © 2005 Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen. All rights reserved.
R ises in new HIV infections and the return of the hyper-epidemics of sexually transmissible infections have occurred among gay men in North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. If you look beneath the surface, discourses of failed responsibility and blame are a common reaction among gay men, educators, doctors and governments. When HIV first spread among gay communities in the late 1970s and early 1980s we were 'innocent' because we didn't know it was happening. Underpinning health promotion responses to HIV was the belief that gay men would act responsibly (to themselves) and rationally in order to protect themselves and their health. Over 20 years later, with the rising incidence of HIV infection, we 'know'. Therefore, if we examine our common health-promotion belief, gay men must be 'irrational and irresponsible'— not a comfortable proposition for gay men. Another response to rises in HIV infections is to substitute discourses about 'self-responsibility' with discourses about the 'responsibility' of positive men to the 'other'; if self-responsibility is obviously not always working then let's make positive men 'responsible'. While not denying our partial responsibility, 'sole' responsibility places positive men in a very vulnerable position. I think there are four useful discourses that are familiar in HIV education and worth examining. They are the discourses of: i) self-interest or 'self-responsibility' This is the dominant responsibility discourse, based on the belief that people will act rationally and responsibly in their perceived self-interest to be healthy. Health, however, may be only one of many competing 'self-interests'. Desire, intimacy and pleasure may be listed among the many 'self-interests' associated with sex. 'I don't live to be healthy; I'm healthy to live,' said a person with HIV about the competing self-interests. Further, risk-taking and transgression can be fun: 'guilty' does indeed make me wet after all. In HIV education, self-responsibility or self-interest has been used as the primary motivation for HIV-negative men to stay that way. It has also been used to target positive men. There has been recent firm evidence of the reality of superinfection and of its potentially detrimental impact on the health of a person with HIV. Thus, encouraging HIV-positive men to avoid superinfection was sometimes positioned as 'the way' to motivate them to respond to rises in HIV infection. It overlooked the fact that unprotected sex between positive men results in no new HIV infections.
This article interprets Foucault's life-long involvement with transgressive experiences as an art of not being oneself, an effort to escape identity and become other. By bringing together Foucault's own theoretical practices with those drawn from Deleuze and Blanchot, and linking these with biographical material (modes of existence), I show how Foucault's `encounters' with passion and pleasure in film, philosophy, S/M, drugs, the Greeks and suicide amount to an `art of living', an intensification of the power to affect oneself and others in processes of `subjectivation', creating new possibilities of life. This is what Foucault more precisely called an `ethics' - an immanent ethics in which one becomes worthy of what happens to oneself by becoming a work of art.
While there seems to be general agreement among members of contemporary American society about the value of reducing threats to individual well-being, there are may who actively seek experiences that involve a high potential for personal injury or death. High-risk sports such as hang gliding, skydiving, scuba diving, rock climbing, and the like have enjoyed unprecedented growth in the past several decades even as political institutions in Western societies have sought to reduce the risks of injury in the workplace and elsewhere. The contradiction between the public agenda to reduce the risk of injury and death and the private agenda to increase such risks deserves th attention of sociologists. A literature review is presented that points to a number of shortcomings in existing studies, most of which are associated with the psychological reductionism that predominates in this area of study. An effort is made to provide a sociological account of voluntary risk taking by (1) introducing a new classifying concept- edgework-based on numerous themes emerging from primary and secondary data on risk taking and (2) explaining edgework in terms of the newly emerging social psychological perspective produced from the synthesis of the Marxian and Meadian frameworks. The concept of edgework highlights the most sociologically relevant features of voluntary risk taking, while the connections between various aspects of risk-taking behaviour and structural characteristic of modern American society at both the micro and macro levels. This approach ties together such factors as political economic variables, at one end of the continuum, and individual sensations and feelings, at the other end.
This article responds to the call by cultural criminologists for a 'criminology of the skin' that attends to the embodied pleasures and emotions generated by certain forms of criminal behavior. Drawing on the 'edgework' model of voluntary risk taking and a modified version of Jurgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, I theorize risk taking in criminal endeavors as an activity linked to the embodied social practices of the life-world. Conceptualized in this way, illicit risk taking can be seen to play an important role in crystallizing the 'criminal erotics' involved in some types of crime. Standing in opposition to the disembodied system imperatives of late capitalism, criminal edgework represents a form of escape and resistance to the prevailing structures of political and economic power.
At the heart of health promotion is an unproblematized assumption about a universal fear of dying. Advocates of health promotion try to tap into this fear and use it as a motivating factor to reduce risky practices. When death avoidance is not apparent – or resisted on the part of the subject – this is taken as evidence of the subject’s irrationality or moral depravity. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research conducted on ‘circuit parties’ – large, all-night dance parties attended primarily by gay men – to argue that this assumption is neither analytically nor practically productive. I use the bodily pleasures associated with circuit parties to develop an alternative means of thinking about risky practices. Using the work of Axel Honneth to frame the circuit experience, it becomes possible to think about risky practice as a corporally embodied desire for social recognition rather than an expression of the mad immoral subject.
This paper addresses the development of post-disciplinary ‘actuarial’ or risk-based technologies of power. Arguing against models which focus on icreased efficiency as an evolutionary criterion for emerging technologies of power, it suggests that such technologies' place and form are largely dtermined by the nature and fortunes of political programs with which they are aligned. Thus the rise of neo-conservatism and related programs have extensively modified and curtailed programs based on risk models, and expanded those based on punishment and discipline. The paper examines the nature of situational crime prevention in the light of these ideas, and moves on to consider certain broader theoretical implications.
TO assess the maintenance of safe sexual practice. (We use the term 'safe' sex throughout the paper, since 'safe' is the term adopted by the Australian National Committee on AIDS).
Maintenance was assessed by comparing sexual behaviour with both regular and casual partners reported in a 1986/1987 survey (time 1) with behaviour reported in a second survey in 1991 (time 2).
The 145 homosexually active participants were a non-clinical sample recruited in 1986/1987 by advertisement and followed-up in 1991. A structured questionnaire was administered at both times. Items included questions about the nature of the men's sexual relationships and their sexual practices.
Our findings indicate that the majority of men had sustained safe sex practices. HIV prevention strategies adopted included condom use, avoidance of anal intercourse and negotiated safety (i.e., the negotiated practice of unprotected anal intercourse within regular partnerships of concordant serostatus).
Negotiated safety is not the same as relapse.
To assess the prevalence of and factors associated with "Barebacking" as a sociocultural phenomenon in a sample of HIV-positive and -negative men who have sex with men (MSM), and to assess the reasons for barebacking and venues for meeting partners.
A cross-sectional survey of MSM recruited in the San Francisco Bay Area from July 2000 to February 2001.
Barebacking, defined as "intentional anal sex without a condom with someone other than a primary partner", was assessed among men who had heard of the term. Participants were recruited outside multiple venues and interviewed later at community locations. Chi-square and multivariate logistic regression were used for analysis.
The sample (n = 554) of MSM were African-American (28%), Latino (27%), white (31%) and other race/ethnicity (14%); 35% reported being HIV-positive. Seventy per cent of the men had heard of barebacking. Among men aware of the term, 14% had barebacked in the past 2 years (22% of HIV-positive versus 10% of HIV-negative men, P < 0.001); 10% of the full sample did so. The prevalence of barebacking did not differ by race/ethnicity or sexual orientation identification. Men tended to report bareback partners who had the same HIV serostatus; however, a sizeable proportion of men had partners of different or unknown serostatus. Increased physical stimulation and emotional connectedness were the primary reasons for barebacking.
New approaches are needed to reduce bareback behavior and the risk of HIV transmission, including innovative health-promoting behavioral and biomedical interventions.
Based on the idea that risks are knowable, calculable and preventable, dominant social scientific and health promotion discourses foster an image of individual risk control and responsibility. The presentation of the self is a moral enterprise. Accounts of unprotected sex by HIV positive people who have the potential to transmit HIV to their sexual partners can be particularly morally charged. Drawing on 73 depth qualitative interviews with HIV positive people and their sexual partners, this paper explores how the interview accounts of unprotected sex can illuminate the way in which the self is presented within the context of situated norms of risk acceptability and moral responsibility. We identify two forms of account: stories of agency; and stories of acceptability. Stories of agency tend to deny agency and abdicate individual responsibility given the circumstances, and were also a key feature of accounts in which the sexual partners of HIV positive people were placed at risk of HIV transmission. Categories of appeal included the denial of agency as a consequence of: risk calculus and condom accidents; alcohol and drug effects; powerlessness and coercion; and forces of nature. By contrast, stories of acceptability tend to justify unprotected sex as acceptable. Categories of appeal included: HIV positive concordance; and commitment in relationships. Other forms of justification included: alter responsibility; and intentional HIV transmission. We conclude that accounts of risk management are risk managed. We call for greater attention by social scientists to the way in which accounts are constructed, and in particular, to 'anti-rational' forms of explanation within accounts.
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