Kane Race (BA (Hons.), LLB, PhD, FAHA) is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His work approaches drugs and the transformations that drugs are taken to induce as significant elements in the crafting of effective history. He has particular interest in drug practices that have emerged in connection with cultural and sociotechnical responses to HIV/AIDS, from the clinical repurposing of antiretroviral drugs to prevent and control infection to subcultural uses of stimulants to create and sustain certain forms of sexual sociability. He is the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (Duke UP, 2009); Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water (MIT Press, 2015, with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter); and The Gay Science: Intimate experiments with the problem of HIV (Routledge, 2018). With Melissa Hardie and Meaghan Morris he co-edited The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies (Indiana University Press, 2024).
On a summer night in 2007, the Azure Party, part of Sydney’s annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, i... more On a summer night in 2007, the Azure Party, part of Sydney’s annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, is underway. Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drug-related emergencies that occasionally occur. But when police appear at the gates with drug-detecting dogs, mild panic ensues. Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose. Others try their luck at the gates. After twenty-six attendees are arrested with small quantities of illicit substances, the party is shut down and the remaining partygoers disperse into the city streets. For Kane Race, the Azure Party drug search is emblematic of a broader technology of power that converges on embodiment, consumption, and pleasure in the name of health. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he illuminates the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfills for the neoliberal state. As he demonstrates, the state’s performance of moral sovereignty around substances designated “illicit” bears little relation to the actual dangers of drug consumption; in fact, it exacerbates those dangers.
Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.
Trevor Hoppe: "In his latest book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, Kane Race continues to advance hi... more Trevor Hoppe: "In his latest book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, Kane Race continues to advance his concept of "counterpublic health" -- a concept built on the work of feminist and queer scholars invested in understanding oppositional public spheres.I had the pleasure of interviewing Kane recently for this blog, and I'm thrilled to share his thoughts here. We talk about public health, HIV prevention, and his challenging concept that aims to shake up our conventional understandings of these complex phenomenon"
The Gay Science
Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men ... more The Gay Science
Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically and historically detailed case studies, the book examines how new technologies and scientific artifacts – such as antiretroviral therapy, digital hookup apps and research methods – mediate sexual encounters and shape the worlds and self-practices of men who have sex with men.
Rather than debunking scientific practices or minimizing their significance, The Gay Science approaches these practices as ways in which we ‘learn to be affected’ by HIV. It explores what knowledge practices best engage us, move us and increase our powers and capacities for action. The book includes an historical analysis of drug use as a significant element in the formation of urban gay cultures; constructivist accounts of the emergence of barebacking and chemsex; a performative response to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and its uptake; and, a speculative analysis of ways of thinking and doing sexual community in the digital context.
Combining insights from queer theory, process philosophy and science and technology studies to develop an original approach to the analysis of sexuality, drug use, public health and digital practices, this book demonstrates the ontological consequences of different modes of attending to risk and pleasure. It is suitable for those interested in cultural studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, digital culture, public health and drug and alcohol studies.
Kane Race is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the convenor of the Queer Contingent of Unharm and the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (2009) and Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water (with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter, 2015).
In this interview with Jamie Hakim, Kane Race talks about his most recent monograph The Gay Scien... more In this interview with Jamie Hakim, Kane Race talks about his most recent monograph The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments With the Problem of HIV (2018). In The Gay Science, he explores how practices of sex and intimacy between gay men are shifting amidst what he calls the changing infrastructures of gay life-digital, chemical and communal. As such the book is empirically oriented and looks at a wide range of topics from hookup apps, to PreP to chemsex/party 'n' play, to the history and politics of Sydney's Mardi Gras as they take place on the ground. Theoretically he blends the thought of philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzche with critical perspectives such as actor-network theory and Science and Technology Studies to argue that as scholars of sexual practice we need to pay more attention to what emerges within the contingencies of the assemblages and infrastructures that make sex between gay men possible. In so doing, the book is far more optimistic about gay sex and digital media then either popular media or influential strands of queer theory, offering path-breaking insight into the major concerns of this special issue on Chemsex Cultures.
How did branded bottles of water insinuate themselves into our daily lives? Why did water become ... more How did branded bottles of water insinuate themselves into our daily lives? Why did water become an economic good—no longer a common resource but a commercial product, in industry parlance a “fast moving consumer good,” or FMCG? Plastic Water examines the processes behind this transformation. It goes beyond the usual political and environmental critiques of bottled water to investigate its multiplicity, examining a bottle of water’s simultaneous existence as, among other things, a product, personal health resource, object of boycotts, and part of accumulating waste matter. Throughout, the book focuses on the ontological dimensions of drinking bottled water—the ways in which this habit enacts new relations and meanings that may interfere with other drinking water practices.
The book considers the assemblage and emergence of a mass market for water, from the invention of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle in 1973 to the development of “hydration science” that accompanied the rise of jogging in the United States. It looks at what bottles do in the world, tracing drinking and disposal practices in three Asian cities with unreliable access to safe water: Bangkok, Chennai, and Hanoi. And it considers the possibility of ethical drinking, examining campaigns to “say no” to the bottle and promote the consumption of tap water in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose work on the rel... more Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose work on the relations between sexuality, power, knowledge and subjectivity served as a crucial basis for the emergence and articulation of queer studies. The introductory volume to The History of Sexuality (1978) provided the critical ballast necessary for constituting sexuality as a primary category of social analysis; a vector of social oppression that intersects with but is irreducible to gender, race and class. It was also a major factor in effecting a shift in lesbian and gay studies from conceiving sexual identities as essentialized, transhistorical, self-evident and stable categories of personal and political identity towards a vision of queer studies oriented around a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. This entry outlines key concepts and situates key arguments from Foucault’s later work including disciplinary power, normalization, biopower, genealogy, power/knowledge and his critique of identity.
Keywords: biopower; normalization; genealogy; bodies; identity; power/knowledge
Book chapter
Drawing on my experience of living with HIV for over two decades, this essay disc... more Book chapter
Drawing on my experience of living with HIV for over two decades, this essay discusses the forms of anxiety and concern that emerged in 1996 in the context of the introduction of HIV combination antiretroviral therapy around the use of so-called 'drug cocktails'. It shows how these concerns reflect broader anxieties about increasing sexual activity between men at this time. This event happens to kickstart a corresponding problematisation of gay men's use of recreational drugs– another sort of 'drug cocktail' - on the same basis. I see the present moral panic over chemsex as the latest instalment of this discourse.
The piece demonstrates the analogous character of antiretroviral therapy and recreational substance use in gay men's practice, arguing that pleasure, self-medication, and experimentation with the conditions of life are concerns that cut across outdated distinctions between pharmaceutical drugs and illicit drugs. Meanwhile, the stigmatised and criminalised status of HIV-positive sex, gay sexuality and illicit drug use produces paranoid subjects and effectively endangers the health and wellbeing of those affected. It must be countered. Paying attention to the collective experiments of drug users is likely to be much more generative.
I wrote this piece for a collection called Long Term, edited by Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, who invited me to write something about living with HIV.
Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (‘PREP’) has so far emerged as a reluctant object in much gay community ... more 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 USA 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 the ways in which condoms have served as a way of managing 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.
Reprint of a section of my GLQ, 2016 article with the same title, in Escoffier, J. & Speildenner,... more Reprint of a section of my GLQ, 2016 article with the same title, in Escoffier, J. & Speildenner, A. (2023) A Pill for Promiscuity: Gay Sex in the Age of Pharmaceuticals. Rutgers University Press. Chapter 7
This article considers the alarming escalation in the use of strip-searching on the part of the N... more This article considers the alarming escalation in the use of strip-searching on the part of the New South Wales police over the past decade and its connection with street-level drug policing including drug dog operations. These strategies mobilise a technology of detection which draws police ever more intently into the orbit of the sexual and sexual violation and in ever-closer proximity to the genital, the vaginal and the anal cavities of those it forcibly produces as suspects. I am especially interested in the symbolic, spectacular, gendered and performative dimensions of these 'devices of sexual saturation'; their opportunistic deployment to patrol minoritarian populations (Aboriginal people, young people/minors, sexual and racial minorities) and cast aspersions on their self-sovereign capacities. Framed by the law as technologies of drug detection, these operations are better conceptualised as technologies of abjection devoted to the production of violable subjects as part of brutal ongoing efforts to shore up the authority of self-asserted, stolen sovereignty. A narcofeminist lens brings these gendered dimensions of drug policing into better view. Here, the 'possessive logics' that Aileen Moreton-Robinson implicates in the performativity of patriarchal white sovereignty on the part of the 'postcolonising' Australian state find their pretext and source of legitimation in the rhetoric of drugs and the fantasised sovereign subject it maintains as a requirement for the general functioning of the law: the 'master of her intentions and desires', in Derrida's words. This mobilisation of technologies of abjection under the guise of drug enforcement is part of a longer story about the racialisation of sexuality and the sexualisation of race as biopolitical trajectories that naturalise and maintain settler-colonialism and its worlds. Countering their violence entails forging new solidarities among minoritarian constituencies that articulate, affirm and reactivate the non-sovereign potentials/performatives that inhere in our mutual vulnerability and relationally-constituted capacity for endurance.
The absence of pleasure in harm reduction discourse is more and more frequently noted, but few ha... more The absence of pleasure in harm reduction discourse is more and more frequently noted, but few have considered what, exactly, more attention to pleasure might do. What is the value of pleasure for harm reduction praxis? Central to such an inquiry is the question of how pleasure is grasped, conceptually and methodologically. In this paper I use Foucault’s History of Sexuality to elaborate a perspective on the use of pleasure within harm reduction. I argue that Foucault’s work suggests a distinction between therapeutic and social-pragmatic approaches to pleasure, and that such a distinction is important for harm reduction – to the extent that it seeks to maintain a critical awareness of the relation between stigma and care – in that the latter model raises the possibility of maintaining de-pathologizing modes of care. An appreciation of pleasure in terms of its social pragmatics helps to recognize practices of safety, care and risk that might otherwise go unregistered in the current punitive political environment. It provides a basis for conceiving practical measures that are in touch with given concerns and bodily practices, and thus have more chance of being taken up. It also enables a more dynamic and responsive approach to the practice of bodies and pleasures.
Understanding the emergence of contemporary gay identity is impossible without considering the hi... more Understanding the emergence of contemporary gay identity is impossible without considering the history of parties. A party is an event: a provisional and temporary coming together of diverse elements, people and things. A festive mode of social participation. Neither temporally permanent nor spatially fixed, parties nevertheless leave their imprint on cultural memory, urban geography – even political identity. And though party practices are immensely variable and historically diverse, patterns can be traced which reveal much about the shifting relations between sexual minorities, social authorities, and cultural economies. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, I argued that greater attentiveness to pleasure and its varieties and social dynamics might enable new ways of reflecting on policies and practices of care (Race, 2009). Here I supplement that analysis with a more historically and geographically specific investigation of parties as they have featured in the formation and imagination of urban gay identity, with a particular focus on Sydney and some of the metropolitan histories its gay community draws upon, such as that of New York. My primary claim is that psychostimulant drugs have played a productive part in the materialization of gay political identity in the twentieth century. But figuring the activity of drugs within cultural processes raises the problem of pharmacological determinism. Hence my focus on party practices. Situating drug use as one practice among the many that make up lives and cultures may allow an acknowledgement of their activity in the formation and transformation of spaces of sexual expressivity without reifying drugs as fixed, in terms of their significance or effects.
Please click on link above ABSTRACT [homotectonic] for copy of the chapter.
At parties we come together to lose ourselves in a bewildering array of encounters, sensations an... more At parties we come together to lose ourselves in a bewildering array of encounters, sensations and events. We know there will be dancing and mingling and flirting and snogging but the specifics are impossible to know in advance. Being part of the party requires us to give ourselves over to what is unknown about the adventures ahead—at once a thrilling and terrifying prospect. We prepare ourselves to become part of an adventure in collectivity, to be exposed to others, to move together, to be seized by passions, to become available to the event. Only a very deep-seated commitment to the idea of the dancefloor as a radical break from the mundane world could begin to explain the elaborate infrastructures of pleasure that party producers began to create in the expansive pavilions of the Royal Agricultural Society Showgrounds for the early Mardi Gras parties, RAT parties, Sleaze Ball, and so on in Sydney over the 1980s and 1990s —and their sheer scale!—replete with creative design concepts, extravagant live performances, individual themes that fostered increasingly outrageous creativity and theatricality among their partygoers, community art installations, audio-visual effects that became more and more intricate and high-tech as the decade went on, and the extended hours of unrestricted license that lent themselves generously to a version of party-as-adventure/marathon. All this hard work leaves traces and artefacts, its authors are identifiable, and the pieces can be pulled together to tell the kind of stories “The Party” as an exhibition displays. What is less readily available for archiving or historical analysis - but what this essay tries to convey — is the experiential multiplicity of partygoing, the informal, precariously assembled architecture that shapes our experience as partygoers.
The singularity or distinctive significance of the culture and institutions of Mardi Gras, dance ... more The singularity or distinctive significance of the culture and institutions of Mardi Gras, dance parties, and the spectacular practices of gay, lesbian and transgender inner city subcultures is becoming apparent only now as they transform and disappear. Recent years have seen a substantial loss of interest in the large-scale dance party, for example, a form that had come to comprise one of the primary sources of independent revenue for gay and lesbian cultural, political and health institutions. The subsequent insolvency crisis of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 2002 echoed similar events in other gay urban centres, spelling a substantial challenge for the funding of gay and lesbian cultural and political initiatives. I want to examine briefly here the impact of drugs on the viability of the queer dance party form, with a view to challenging some of the more common assumptions surrounding their conceptualisation. I want to argue that drugs are important social actors with effects frequently exceeding common assignments of value, harm, effect, and productivity. But if drugs do complicate distinctions between the biological and the social, they do so in ways that are rarely predictable and often surprising.
Routledge Handbook of Intoxicants and Intoxication, 2021
This chapter argues that disinhibition provides a better frame than competing concepts such as 'm... more This chapter argues that disinhibition provides a better frame than competing concepts such as 'minority stress' for grasping the significance of the chemical practices of sex and gender minorities. Disinhibition draws attention to the pragmatic, performative dimensions of intoxicant consumption while keeping the material constraints enacted by the stigmatisation of non-normative sexual and gender expression in view. A genealogy of dis/inhibition reveals its affinities with the pathologisation of sexual and gender minorities from the 19th century, enabling us to see how the consumption of intoxicating substances might emerge as part of processes of counter-corporealisation over the ensuing century. Drawing on qualitative research with LGBTQ+ drug and alcohol consumers in Australia, we explore how queer and trans cultures of sex and drug experimentation activate the mode of play and playfulness to engage in practices of queer world-making that counter the material pressures of 'inhibition'.
On a summer night in 2007, the Azure Party, part of Sydney’s annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, i... more On a summer night in 2007, the Azure Party, part of Sydney’s annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, is underway. Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drug-related emergencies that occasionally occur. But when police appear at the gates with drug-detecting dogs, mild panic ensues. Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose. Others try their luck at the gates. After twenty-six attendees are arrested with small quantities of illicit substances, the party is shut down and the remaining partygoers disperse into the city streets. For Kane Race, the Azure Party drug search is emblematic of a broader technology of power that converges on embodiment, consumption, and pleasure in the name of health. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he illuminates the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfills for the neoliberal state. As he demonstrates, the state’s performance of moral sovereignty around substances designated “illicit” bears little relation to the actual dangers of drug consumption; in fact, it exacerbates those dangers.
Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.
Trevor Hoppe: "In his latest book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, Kane Race continues to advance hi... more Trevor Hoppe: "In his latest book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, Kane Race continues to advance his concept of "counterpublic health" -- a concept built on the work of feminist and queer scholars invested in understanding oppositional public spheres.I had the pleasure of interviewing Kane recently for this blog, and I'm thrilled to share his thoughts here. We talk about public health, HIV prevention, and his challenging concept that aims to shake up our conventional understandings of these complex phenomenon"
The Gay Science
Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men ... more The Gay Science
Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically and historically detailed case studies, the book examines how new technologies and scientific artifacts – such as antiretroviral therapy, digital hookup apps and research methods – mediate sexual encounters and shape the worlds and self-practices of men who have sex with men.
Rather than debunking scientific practices or minimizing their significance, The Gay Science approaches these practices as ways in which we ‘learn to be affected’ by HIV. It explores what knowledge practices best engage us, move us and increase our powers and capacities for action. The book includes an historical analysis of drug use as a significant element in the formation of urban gay cultures; constructivist accounts of the emergence of barebacking and chemsex; a performative response to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and its uptake; and, a speculative analysis of ways of thinking and doing sexual community in the digital context.
Combining insights from queer theory, process philosophy and science and technology studies to develop an original approach to the analysis of sexuality, drug use, public health and digital practices, this book demonstrates the ontological consequences of different modes of attending to risk and pleasure. It is suitable for those interested in cultural studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, digital culture, public health and drug and alcohol studies.
Kane Race is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the convenor of the Queer Contingent of Unharm and the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (2009) and Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water (with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter, 2015).
In this interview with Jamie Hakim, Kane Race talks about his most recent monograph The Gay Scien... more In this interview with Jamie Hakim, Kane Race talks about his most recent monograph The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments With the Problem of HIV (2018). In The Gay Science, he explores how practices of sex and intimacy between gay men are shifting amidst what he calls the changing infrastructures of gay life-digital, chemical and communal. As such the book is empirically oriented and looks at a wide range of topics from hookup apps, to PreP to chemsex/party 'n' play, to the history and politics of Sydney's Mardi Gras as they take place on the ground. Theoretically he blends the thought of philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzche with critical perspectives such as actor-network theory and Science and Technology Studies to argue that as scholars of sexual practice we need to pay more attention to what emerges within the contingencies of the assemblages and infrastructures that make sex between gay men possible. In so doing, the book is far more optimistic about gay sex and digital media then either popular media or influential strands of queer theory, offering path-breaking insight into the major concerns of this special issue on Chemsex Cultures.
How did branded bottles of water insinuate themselves into our daily lives? Why did water become ... more How did branded bottles of water insinuate themselves into our daily lives? Why did water become an economic good—no longer a common resource but a commercial product, in industry parlance a “fast moving consumer good,” or FMCG? Plastic Water examines the processes behind this transformation. It goes beyond the usual political and environmental critiques of bottled water to investigate its multiplicity, examining a bottle of water’s simultaneous existence as, among other things, a product, personal health resource, object of boycotts, and part of accumulating waste matter. Throughout, the book focuses on the ontological dimensions of drinking bottled water—the ways in which this habit enacts new relations and meanings that may interfere with other drinking water practices.
The book considers the assemblage and emergence of a mass market for water, from the invention of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle in 1973 to the development of “hydration science” that accompanied the rise of jogging in the United States. It looks at what bottles do in the world, tracing drinking and disposal practices in three Asian cities with unreliable access to safe water: Bangkok, Chennai, and Hanoi. And it considers the possibility of ethical drinking, examining campaigns to “say no” to the bottle and promote the consumption of tap water in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose work on the rel... more Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose work on the relations between sexuality, power, knowledge and subjectivity served as a crucial basis for the emergence and articulation of queer studies. The introductory volume to The History of Sexuality (1978) provided the critical ballast necessary for constituting sexuality as a primary category of social analysis; a vector of social oppression that intersects with but is irreducible to gender, race and class. It was also a major factor in effecting a shift in lesbian and gay studies from conceiving sexual identities as essentialized, transhistorical, self-evident and stable categories of personal and political identity towards a vision of queer studies oriented around a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. This entry outlines key concepts and situates key arguments from Foucault’s later work including disciplinary power, normalization, biopower, genealogy, power/knowledge and his critique of identity.
Keywords: biopower; normalization; genealogy; bodies; identity; power/knowledge
Book chapter
Drawing on my experience of living with HIV for over two decades, this essay disc... more Book chapter
Drawing on my experience of living with HIV for over two decades, this essay discusses the forms of anxiety and concern that emerged in 1996 in the context of the introduction of HIV combination antiretroviral therapy around the use of so-called 'drug cocktails'. It shows how these concerns reflect broader anxieties about increasing sexual activity between men at this time. This event happens to kickstart a corresponding problematisation of gay men's use of recreational drugs– another sort of 'drug cocktail' - on the same basis. I see the present moral panic over chemsex as the latest instalment of this discourse.
The piece demonstrates the analogous character of antiretroviral therapy and recreational substance use in gay men's practice, arguing that pleasure, self-medication, and experimentation with the conditions of life are concerns that cut across outdated distinctions between pharmaceutical drugs and illicit drugs. Meanwhile, the stigmatised and criminalised status of HIV-positive sex, gay sexuality and illicit drug use produces paranoid subjects and effectively endangers the health and wellbeing of those affected. It must be countered. Paying attention to the collective experiments of drug users is likely to be much more generative.
I wrote this piece for a collection called Long Term, edited by Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, who invited me to write something about living with HIV.
Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (‘PREP’) has so far emerged as a reluctant object in much gay community ... more 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 USA 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 the ways in which condoms have served as a way of managing 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.
Reprint of a section of my GLQ, 2016 article with the same title, in Escoffier, J. & Speildenner,... more Reprint of a section of my GLQ, 2016 article with the same title, in Escoffier, J. & Speildenner, A. (2023) A Pill for Promiscuity: Gay Sex in the Age of Pharmaceuticals. Rutgers University Press. Chapter 7
This article considers the alarming escalation in the use of strip-searching on the part of the N... more This article considers the alarming escalation in the use of strip-searching on the part of the New South Wales police over the past decade and its connection with street-level drug policing including drug dog operations. These strategies mobilise a technology of detection which draws police ever more intently into the orbit of the sexual and sexual violation and in ever-closer proximity to the genital, the vaginal and the anal cavities of those it forcibly produces as suspects. I am especially interested in the symbolic, spectacular, gendered and performative dimensions of these 'devices of sexual saturation'; their opportunistic deployment to patrol minoritarian populations (Aboriginal people, young people/minors, sexual and racial minorities) and cast aspersions on their self-sovereign capacities. Framed by the law as technologies of drug detection, these operations are better conceptualised as technologies of abjection devoted to the production of violable subjects as part of brutal ongoing efforts to shore up the authority of self-asserted, stolen sovereignty. A narcofeminist lens brings these gendered dimensions of drug policing into better view. Here, the 'possessive logics' that Aileen Moreton-Robinson implicates in the performativity of patriarchal white sovereignty on the part of the 'postcolonising' Australian state find their pretext and source of legitimation in the rhetoric of drugs and the fantasised sovereign subject it maintains as a requirement for the general functioning of the law: the 'master of her intentions and desires', in Derrida's words. This mobilisation of technologies of abjection under the guise of drug enforcement is part of a longer story about the racialisation of sexuality and the sexualisation of race as biopolitical trajectories that naturalise and maintain settler-colonialism and its worlds. Countering their violence entails forging new solidarities among minoritarian constituencies that articulate, affirm and reactivate the non-sovereign potentials/performatives that inhere in our mutual vulnerability and relationally-constituted capacity for endurance.
The absence of pleasure in harm reduction discourse is more and more frequently noted, but few ha... more The absence of pleasure in harm reduction discourse is more and more frequently noted, but few have considered what, exactly, more attention to pleasure might do. What is the value of pleasure for harm reduction praxis? Central to such an inquiry is the question of how pleasure is grasped, conceptually and methodologically. In this paper I use Foucault’s History of Sexuality to elaborate a perspective on the use of pleasure within harm reduction. I argue that Foucault’s work suggests a distinction between therapeutic and social-pragmatic approaches to pleasure, and that such a distinction is important for harm reduction – to the extent that it seeks to maintain a critical awareness of the relation between stigma and care – in that the latter model raises the possibility of maintaining de-pathologizing modes of care. An appreciation of pleasure in terms of its social pragmatics helps to recognize practices of safety, care and risk that might otherwise go unregistered in the current punitive political environment. It provides a basis for conceiving practical measures that are in touch with given concerns and bodily practices, and thus have more chance of being taken up. It also enables a more dynamic and responsive approach to the practice of bodies and pleasures.
Understanding the emergence of contemporary gay identity is impossible without considering the hi... more Understanding the emergence of contemporary gay identity is impossible without considering the history of parties. A party is an event: a provisional and temporary coming together of diverse elements, people and things. A festive mode of social participation. Neither temporally permanent nor spatially fixed, parties nevertheless leave their imprint on cultural memory, urban geography – even political identity. And though party practices are immensely variable and historically diverse, patterns can be traced which reveal much about the shifting relations between sexual minorities, social authorities, and cultural economies. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, I argued that greater attentiveness to pleasure and its varieties and social dynamics might enable new ways of reflecting on policies and practices of care (Race, 2009). Here I supplement that analysis with a more historically and geographically specific investigation of parties as they have featured in the formation and imagination of urban gay identity, with a particular focus on Sydney and some of the metropolitan histories its gay community draws upon, such as that of New York. My primary claim is that psychostimulant drugs have played a productive part in the materialization of gay political identity in the twentieth century. But figuring the activity of drugs within cultural processes raises the problem of pharmacological determinism. Hence my focus on party practices. Situating drug use as one practice among the many that make up lives and cultures may allow an acknowledgement of their activity in the formation and transformation of spaces of sexual expressivity without reifying drugs as fixed, in terms of their significance or effects.
Please click on link above ABSTRACT [homotectonic] for copy of the chapter.
At parties we come together to lose ourselves in a bewildering array of encounters, sensations an... more At parties we come together to lose ourselves in a bewildering array of encounters, sensations and events. We know there will be dancing and mingling and flirting and snogging but the specifics are impossible to know in advance. Being part of the party requires us to give ourselves over to what is unknown about the adventures ahead—at once a thrilling and terrifying prospect. We prepare ourselves to become part of an adventure in collectivity, to be exposed to others, to move together, to be seized by passions, to become available to the event. Only a very deep-seated commitment to the idea of the dancefloor as a radical break from the mundane world could begin to explain the elaborate infrastructures of pleasure that party producers began to create in the expansive pavilions of the Royal Agricultural Society Showgrounds for the early Mardi Gras parties, RAT parties, Sleaze Ball, and so on in Sydney over the 1980s and 1990s —and their sheer scale!—replete with creative design concepts, extravagant live performances, individual themes that fostered increasingly outrageous creativity and theatricality among their partygoers, community art installations, audio-visual effects that became more and more intricate and high-tech as the decade went on, and the extended hours of unrestricted license that lent themselves generously to a version of party-as-adventure/marathon. All this hard work leaves traces and artefacts, its authors are identifiable, and the pieces can be pulled together to tell the kind of stories “The Party” as an exhibition displays. What is less readily available for archiving or historical analysis - but what this essay tries to convey — is the experiential multiplicity of partygoing, the informal, precariously assembled architecture that shapes our experience as partygoers.
The singularity or distinctive significance of the culture and institutions of Mardi Gras, dance ... more The singularity or distinctive significance of the culture and institutions of Mardi Gras, dance parties, and the spectacular practices of gay, lesbian and transgender inner city subcultures is becoming apparent only now as they transform and disappear. Recent years have seen a substantial loss of interest in the large-scale dance party, for example, a form that had come to comprise one of the primary sources of independent revenue for gay and lesbian cultural, political and health institutions. The subsequent insolvency crisis of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 2002 echoed similar events in other gay urban centres, spelling a substantial challenge for the funding of gay and lesbian cultural and political initiatives. I want to examine briefly here the impact of drugs on the viability of the queer dance party form, with a view to challenging some of the more common assumptions surrounding their conceptualisation. I want to argue that drugs are important social actors with effects frequently exceeding common assignments of value, harm, effect, and productivity. But if drugs do complicate distinctions between the biological and the social, they do so in ways that are rarely predictable and often surprising.
Routledge Handbook of Intoxicants and Intoxication, 2021
This chapter argues that disinhibition provides a better frame than competing concepts such as 'm... more This chapter argues that disinhibition provides a better frame than competing concepts such as 'minority stress' for grasping the significance of the chemical practices of sex and gender minorities. Disinhibition draws attention to the pragmatic, performative dimensions of intoxicant consumption while keeping the material constraints enacted by the stigmatisation of non-normative sexual and gender expression in view. A genealogy of dis/inhibition reveals its affinities with the pathologisation of sexual and gender minorities from the 19th century, enabling us to see how the consumption of intoxicating substances might emerge as part of processes of counter-corporealisation over the ensuing century. Drawing on qualitative research with LGBTQ+ drug and alcohol consumers in Australia, we explore how queer and trans cultures of sex and drug experimentation activate the mode of play and playfulness to engage in practices of queer world-making that counter the material pressures of 'inhibition'.
The Gay Science: intimate experiments with HIV, 2018
Queer counterpublics have been seen as a significant resource for gay men's HIV prevention and ha... more Queer counterpublics have been seen as a significant resource for gay men's HIV prevention and harm reduction (Berlant & Warner 1998; Warner 2002; Race 2009). This chapter works with this concept to think about how critical collectivities of sex and social movements around HIV prevention might operate in the digital context. The question is particularly timely right now, since we are in the middle of a radical transformation in sexual geography in many Western contexts, and digital technologies are no doubt implicated in whatever will emerge from this. In my home town of Sydney, regarded by many as the historical and symbolic centre of Australian gay life, the intensity of the state assault on 'nightlife' in the last couple of years has left many of us reeling, as one by one bars, clubs, parties and the experience of street-life that connects them seem to be vanishing through closures, curfews and intensive policing. The urban conditions that once made it possible to imagine Sydney's LGBTIQ population as a heterogenous but inclusive sexual community are changing rapidly and inexorably. While some see these changes as a welcome by-product of the increasing acceptance of gays and lesbians into mainstream life, the governmental erasure of urban sexual scenes has occurred alongside a proliferation of homonormative discourses that prioritise marriage equality and normalising conceptions of gay life. In their eagerness to present gays and lesbians as respectable, everyday folk, these discourses frequently assume sex, drug and HIV-phobic forms (Liu 2015, p. 2). Their capacity to shut down constructive responses to the realities of sex, drugs and HIV infection will not be lost on anyone who has followed online discussions of any of these topics recently. These remarkably polarised and polarising debates are conspicuous for their denigration of those expressions of queer or embodied life that are taken to compromise the public image of sexual minorities as normal upstanding citizens. Needless to say, such instances of 'in-group purification' (Goffman 1963, p. 108) further stigmatise practices that require more constructive, generous forms of attention and open acknowledgement, especially with respect to their public health implications.
The exemplification of queer counterpublics in the critical literature draws extensively on the cultural forms of late twentieth-century urban sexual subcultures in the West, pre-Internet. This paper aims to distil some key principles from this work and consider how they might be taken forward and enacted in the present context, given the increasing prominence of sexual media and hookup apps as constituent elements of gay sexual culture.
This paper considers how certain functions of online hook-up devices are participating in the eme... more 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, 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.
Routledge Companion to Actor Network Theory, (A. Blok, I. Farias and C. Roberts, Eds).
DRAFT chapter prepared for the Routledge Companion to Actor Network Theory, edited by Anders Blok... more DRAFT chapter prepared for the Routledge Companion to Actor Network Theory, edited by Anders Blok, Ignacio Farias and Celia Roberts, forthcoming.
Actor-network theory and queer theory might appear to be incommensurable pursuits. Sexual bodies-their practices, pleasures, vulnerabilities, constraints-have never been an abiding interest or explicit focus within the branch of Science & Technology Studies most closely associated with ANT. And while both fields are thoroughly indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, the ethnographic approach to the making of science, technology, facts and realities that is a hallmark of ANT produces different emphases than those typically found within queer theory. Where ANT draws attention to the material associations and practical relations that transform contingent relations into durable, concrete realities, queer theorists tend to stress the overarching power of the ideological, normative, disciplinary, discursive and/or psychic structures that produce queer lives as abject, vulnerable and suspect within prevailing social worlds. In this chapter I argue that ANT’s insistence on the contingency of relations among human and non-human actants might help break the stranglehold of totalization sometimes said to characterise queer theorists’ take on heteronormativity. This could generate constructive new forms of attention to projects of ‘queer world-making’ as well as the publics (or ‘counterpublics’) such projects call forth or depend upon. In the first part I conduct a close reading of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s influential (1998) essay ‘Sex in Public’ – perhaps the most robust and compelling early attempt to bring queer theory into articulation with key traditions of social theory – alongside congruent work by Sara Ahmed (2014), with a view to bringing out the activity of non-human actants in the ‘buffer zones’ and ‘elaborate support systems’ these essays rally against. Following ANT, I ask, might these be understood, at least in part, as infrastructures? Worlds capable of sustaining queer lives are meanwhile said to be composed of cultures, communities, arrangements and/or publics that this literature characterises as ‘fragile and ephemeral’. While ANT could arguably help remedy such fragility by providing insights into how stronger worlds or realities are built and sustained, in the second part of this chapter I suggest that ANT could benefit just as significantly from a better appreciation of the critical necessity and/or disruptive effects of these worlds ‘assembled out of the experience of being shattered,’ as Ahmed puts it (2014); the ‘alter-ontologies’ wrought from queer experiments in intimacy.
There are complex historical connections between sexual minoritisation and desires to chemically ... more 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.
The International journal on drug policy, Jan 24, 2018
It is well-established that a high prevalence of substance use is found in lesbian, gay, bisexual... more It is well-established that a high prevalence of substance use is found in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) populations; a finding that researchers attribute to the stigmatised status of non-normative sexual and gender expression, and the role of illicit drug use in the collective production of socio-sexual pleasures, expressivity and disclosure in LGBTIQ communities. Despite the connections between sexual experimentation and substance use, LGBTIQ consumption practices have rarely received the attention they deserve within the alcohol and other drug (AOD) field. In this paper, we draw on concepts from post-structuralist policy analysis to analyse how AOD consumption among sexual and gender minorities is constituted in the policies of three Australian LGBTIQ health organisations. Following Carol Bacchi's (2009, p. xi) observation that we are "governed through problematisations rather than policies", we consider how substance use in LGBTIQ...
A B S T R A C T Within the field of drug and alcohol studies, researchers think about pleasure or... more A B S T R A C T Within the field of drug and alcohol studies, researchers think about pleasure or against it; we analyse, consider, investigate, invoke or ignore it. The philosophically inclined may think of pleasure or write on it, but in each of these scenarios pleasure is kept at an arm's length while the researcher appears to remain unmoved – detached observers, objective scientists, conceptual experts, program directors, sharp critics, policy advocates – sober judges whose sovereignty is secured by the formal conventions of positivist research, established theory, institutional authority and/or disciplinary knowledge. This paper asks what happens when pleasure is allowed to emerge as a constitutive element in the relations of drug and alcohol research. What happens when we conceive our work as thinking with pleasure, rather than simply researching pleasure or thinking about it? I return to the later work of Foucault, reading it alongside conceptions of the experiment drawn from Science and Technology Studies, arguing that both the pleasures of drug consumption and drug research might be conceived more generatively as mutually implicated in events.
In recent work on environmental and health risks, Isabelle Stengers has suggested that governing ... more In recent work on environmental and health risks, Isabelle Stengers has suggested that governing logics have been seized by a strange injunction: ''the right not to pay attention.'' She characterizes ''paying attention'' as an art that brings into play connections we are in the habit of keeping separate. In this article, we use this insight to characterize different forms of prevention in the drugs field, arguing that ''modes of attention'' are an important consideration for harm reduction and counterpublic health. Our case study centers on the ACON Rovers, a team of volunteers who rove around gay dance events on the lookout for people in trouble. Through certain ''arts of interception'' and through an immanent practice of working with possibilities, the Rovers aim to avert certain dangers, especially those associated with use of the drug gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. But doing this work well involves a certain mode of attending to risk, derived from embodied knowledge, that has regard to the affective relations of surveillance. In this article, we seek to describe and theorize the work of the ACON Rovers. We discuss the historical emergence of the program, the forms of knowledge it draws upon and mobilizes, the attention the project pays to affective relations between different actors in the party environment, and the mechanisms the project has installed to assess and reflect upon its work. Since they seek to intervene in drug effects, we argue that the Rovers are engaged in ontological work. Their mode of operation can be contrasted with that of drug enforcement, which often assumes ''the right not to pay attention.''
The Unharm Queer Contingent came together in January 2016, catapulted into action by shared anger... more The Unharm Queer Contingent came together in January 2016, catapulted into action by shared anger and frustration about the policing of queer and other urban spaces with drug detection dogs; concern about the gradual disappearance of Sydney's queer party spaces; commitment to progressive drug policies, especially the decriminalization of drug use, and intertwining histories of enjoying and caring deeply about music, community, diversity, social justice, play and pleasure.
In this unit of study we will examine the ways in which feminist and queer theories have used bod... more In this unit of study we will examine the ways in which feminist and queer theories have used bodies and sexualities in order to theorise difference and identity. The body and sexuality have been shown to be a major site for the operation of power in our society. We will look at how bodies and sexualities have given rise to critical understandings of identity. The unit of study will be devoted to working through some of the major theories of sexuality and embodiment and the analysis of cultural practices.
Forthcoming (2015). In The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, edited by Patricia Whelehan and Anne Bolin. Malden, Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.
Biomedical discourses are uniquely implicated in the constitution of modern sexualities. This ent... more Biomedical discourses are uniquely implicated in the constitution of modern sexualities. This entry discusses some of the most significant sites of tension in which biomedical discourses have been applied, contested, struggled over, appropriated, and transformed, tracing the implications for sexual meanings, experiences, identities, categories, techniques, and politics. From the early constitutive work of sexology, to struggles over binary gender, intersex, transgender experience, and psychiatric diagnoses, sexuality has been a potent field of agitation in which the centrality and authority of biomedical discourses has been brought into question. The entry discusses constructionist, feminist, and poststructuralist challenges to biomedical discourses and describes the practical effects of these interventions. In the twenty-first century, biomedicine itself is undergoing significant and wide-ranging changes. Apprehending the impact of pharmaceuticalization and biotechnical innovation on sexual norms, understandings, and practices is presented as an ongoing challenge.
The Sage Handbook of Drug and Alcohol Studies Vol. 1, 2015
Cultural studies has become a major source of theoretical and critical innovation at the forefron... more Cultural studies has become a major source of theoretical and critical innovation at the forefront of the New Humanities over the last 50 years. As an interdisciplinary space that draws quite liberally on the methods of established disciplines ¬– philosophy, sociology, semiotics, anthropology, history and literary criticism among them – the heterogeneity of what takes place under the sign of cultural studies makes it difficult to pin down as a coherent field. Conceived as an attractor for yet-to-be-devised cross-fertilisations of theory and method, the field has functioned as an experimental horizon enabling innovation and movement to take place in other disciplines. Drug and alcohol researchers have invoked cultural studies as a potential corrective to the predominance of scientific and pathologizing accounts of intoxication. And certainly, cultural studies has levied much-needed attention to the meanings, pleasures and social contexts of drug and alcohol use; their discursive classification; and the regulatory effects of these processes. But surprisingly, drugs and alcohol rarely serve as an explicit point of focus or source of more than cursory attention in key collections of cultural studies. Indeed, drugs function in early cultural studies as a kind of irritant that spurs articulation of some key tensions and problems confronted by the field, including questions regarding the meaning of consumption; agency and passivity; the cultural and the material; subjects and objects; and conceptions of the political. We argue that the trickiness of drugs as a cultural object might yet make them uniquely generative objects for cultural studies, and we discuss the usefulness of newly influential approaches from affect theory and science and technology studies to this effect, before considering the political ambitions of the field. Since the project of cultural studies has always at some level been marked by an explicit discourse of social involvement, its scientific authority is occasionally subject to question within the policy field. Against these criticisms, we argue that the ‘self-situating’ propensity of cultural studies, combined with its empirical commitment to everyday cultures, offer a scholarly repertoire that generates movement between a number of objectives that may be equally important for the drug and alcohol field today: policy application, embodied reflection, speculative inquiry and the voicing of critique.
This two day workshop will explore analytic approaches and concepts that address the intimacies, ... more This two day workshop will explore analytic approaches and concepts that address the intimacies, conflicts and synergies between pleasure and risk in gay men’s sexual practices, cultures, and communities over the past two decades of HIV/AIDS.
Participants will consider key problems and controversies punctuating this history, and explore how different analytic and methodological approaches participate in – and/or attempt to transform – the formation of these problems.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have enhanced their familiarity with key concepts and approaches in HIV social research, queer theory and actor-network theory (Science & Technology Studies). They will be introduced to ways of using these literatures to devise new approaches to HIV and drug research that engage with, and intervene constructively into, sexual practices, cultures and public health problems as currently practiced.
With the rise of Trump, Brexit and amassing support for Far Right ethnonationalist populism inter... more With the rise of Trump, Brexit and amassing support for Far Right ethnonationalist populism internationally, the world is sickening. How have identity politics warped and distorted the complex injuries of capitalism for otherwise privileged citizen-subjects? What does all this have to do with the politics of national sexuality, race, health and medicine? Finally, are there more promising ways of grasping the interclass/identity encounters that are proliferating in the context of ongoing globalisation? Rather than pathologizing difference, this paper argues that identities eventuate from encounters across difference; that this process ought to be affirmed and worked with; and proposes one simple idea: we need to learn to party better.
To read this paper, visit homotectonic.com – the blogpost is called PATHOLOGICAL
In the last decade, many aspects of gay social and sexual life have moved online. This article ex... more In the last decade, many aspects of gay social and sexual life have moved online. This article explores how the increasing use of the internet as a way of organizing gay sex is shaping sexual and risk subjectivities. It investigates how online cruising is mediating investments in, and tensions between, different HIV prevention ethics in Sydney, Australia – in particular, those that operationalise HIV status disclosure as a precursor to casual sex, and those that don’t. One popular online cruising site, Manhunt.net, is the first socio-sexual context in Australia in which participants are routinely asked to indicate their HIV status for sexual purposes, as a design feature of participation. The article grapples with the implications of this development for socio-sexual community. Different sites install culturally specific HIV prevention ethics, which users negotiate in different ways. Online interfaces also generate particular ‘affective climates’ in the sense that they produce new experiences of connection and isolation and create new practical challenges around self-presentation for participants. Affective climates are technologically mediated, and are co-produced and shared by HIV-negative and HIV-positive individuals, among others. Some online formats may be contributing to a new state of ‘seronormativity’ in gay culture, in which the politics of the ‘template’ or the ‘format’ will become increasingly significant. .
In this interview with Jamie Hakim, Kane Race talks about his most recent monograph The Gay Scien... more In this interview with Jamie Hakim, Kane Race talks about his most recent monograph The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments With the Problem of HIV (2018). In The Gay Science, he explores how practices of sex and intimacy between gay men are shifting amidst what he calls the changing infrastructures of gay life-digital, chemical and communal. As such the book is empirically oriented and looks at a wide range of topics from hookup apps, to PreP to chemsex/party 'n' play, to the history and politics of Sydney's Mardi Gras as they take place on the ground. Theoretically he blends the thought of philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzche with critical perspectives such as actor-network theory and Science and Technology Studies to argue that as scholars of sexual practice we need to pay more attention to what emerges within the contingencies of the assemblages and infrastructures that make sex between gay men possible. In so doing, the book is far more optimistic about gay sex and digital media then either popular media or influential strands of queer theory, offering path-breaking insight into the major concerns of this special issue on Chemsex Cultures.
There are complex historical connections between sexual minoritisation and desires to chemically ... more 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 ...
Abstract Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to l... more Abstract Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as theprecautionary principle'(Ewald),preparedness'(Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) orpre-emption'(Derrida). This ...
The singularity or distinctive significance of the culture and institutions of Mardi Gras, dance ... more The singularity or distinctive significance of the culture and institutions of Mardi Gras, dance parties, and the spectacular practices of gay, lesbian and transgender inner city subcultures is becoming apparent only now as they transform and disappear. Recent years have ...
... [CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]; 8. Race , Kane . 2007 . Engaging in a cultur... more ... [CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]; 8. Race , Kane . 2007 . Engaging in a culture of barebacking: Gay men and the risk of HIV prevention . In Gendered risks , K. Hannah-Moffat and P. O'Malley . London : Routledge-Cavendish . ...
Biomedical constructions of health and illness as objective categories have long been challenged ... more 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.
With the advent of effective but demanding anti-retroviral treatment regimes for people with HIV,... more With the advent of effective but demanding anti-retroviral treatment regimes for people with HIV, there has been a renewed interest in the study of medication adherence. This qualitative study aimed to examine how gay men using Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy ...
In this article I plan to look at the significance of the body and its penetration, specifically ... more In this article I plan to look at the significance of the body and its penetration, specifically in a sexual context, at a number of discursive sites. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the image of the penetrated body has come to infer risk: physically, politically. Here my theme ...
ANational Centre in HIV Social Research, Level 2, Webster Building, The University of New South W... more ANational Centre in HIV Social Research, Level 2, Webster Building, The University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW 2052, Australia. BHIV/AIDS and Related Programs (Inner West), Sydney South West Area Health Service, NSW 2050, Australia. CDepartment of Gender and ...
How does crystal meth participate in the continuing experience of HIV among gay men, and how have... more How does crystal meth participate in the continuing experience of HIV among gay men, and how have responses to HIV shaped gay men’s crystal meth use and surrounding practices? This essay, written in 2007, tracks the evolving construction of “the Tina epidemic” – also known as WiredPlay, Chemsex, PNP, the “double epidemic”, etc. Each of these terms does the work of naming, in different geographical contexts, what seem to be some common emerging patterns and forms in urban gay scenes internationally. But what sort of problem is the Tina problem? I argue that how this question gets answered, and by whom, determines what sort of experience it might become.
because I think the analysis if offers remains topical, but the text itself is hard to access in electronic form. Please consider purchasing the book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, from Duke UP 2009.
In recent work on environmental and health risks, Isabelle Stengers has suggested that governing ... more In recent work on environmental and health risks, Isabelle Stengers has suggested that governing logics have been seized by a strange injunction: “the right not to pay attention.” She characterizes “paying attention” as an art that brings into play connections we are in the habit of keeping separate. In this article, we use this insight to characterize different forms of prevention in the drugs field, arguing that “modes of attention” are an important consideration for harm reduction and counterpublic health. Our case study centers on the ACON Rovers, a team of volunteers who rove around gay dance events on the lookout for people in trouble. Through certain “arts of interception” and through an immanent practice of working with possibilities, the Rovers aim to avert certain dangers, especially those associated with use of the drug gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. But doing this work well involves a certain mode of attending to risk, derived from embodied knowledge, that has regard to the ...
‘Slamsex’ has emerged in gay vernacular in recent years to denote a particular way of taking drug... more ‘Slamsex’ has emerged in gay vernacular in recent years to denote a particular way of taking drugs and a particular kind of sex. Slamming refers in this context to the practice of injecting drugs – typically crystal methamphetamine – intravenously. To pair ‘slamming’ with ‘sex’ is to propose that a particular mode of drug administration is constitutive of a particular kind of sex – a relatively novel idea that deserves some unpacking. What does it mean to make a route of drug administration definitional in the delineation of a sexual practice? What does this move reveal about contemporary practices of sex and drug consumption? In this article, we explore these questions with reference to theories of drug effects and practitioners’ accounts of slamsex. We conclude by considering the implications of our analysis for slamsex relations and associated harm reduction measures.
This article works with Connolly's (2004) concept of “emergent causality” to counter the insi... more This article works with Connolly's (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 resear...
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Books by Kane Race
Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.
Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically and historically detailed case studies, the book examines how new technologies and scientific artifacts – such as antiretroviral therapy, digital hookup apps and research methods – mediate sexual encounters and shape the worlds and self-practices of men who have sex with men.
Rather than debunking scientific practices or minimizing their significance, The Gay Science approaches these practices as ways in which we ‘learn to be affected’ by HIV. It explores what knowledge practices best engage us, move us and increase our powers and capacities for action. The book includes an historical analysis of drug use as a significant element in the formation of urban gay cultures; constructivist accounts of the emergence of barebacking and chemsex; a performative response to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and its uptake; and, a speculative analysis of ways of thinking and doing sexual community in the digital context.
Combining insights from queer theory, process philosophy and science and technology studies to develop an original approach to the analysis of sexuality, drug use, public health and digital practices, this book demonstrates the ontological consequences of different modes of attending to risk and pleasure. It is suitable for those interested in cultural studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, digital culture, public health and drug and alcohol studies.
Kane Race is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the convenor of the Queer Contingent of Unharm and the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (2009) and Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water (with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter, 2015).
The book considers the assemblage and emergence of a mass market for water, from the invention of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle in 1973 to the development of “hydration science” that accompanied the rise of jogging in the United States. It looks at what bottles do in the world, tracing drinking and disposal practices in three Asian cities with unreliable access to safe water: Bangkok, Chennai, and Hanoi. And it considers the possibility of ethical drinking, examining campaigns to “say no” to the bottle and promote the consumption of tap water in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Papers by Kane Race
Keywords: biopower; normalization; genealogy; bodies; identity; power/knowledge
Drawing on my experience of living with HIV for over two decades, this essay discusses the forms of anxiety and concern that emerged in 1996 in the context of the introduction of HIV combination antiretroviral therapy around the use of so-called 'drug cocktails'. It shows how these concerns reflect broader anxieties about increasing sexual activity between men at this time. This event happens to kickstart a corresponding problematisation of gay men's use of recreational drugs– another sort of 'drug cocktail' - on the same basis. I see the present moral panic over chemsex as the latest instalment of this discourse.
The piece demonstrates the analogous character of antiretroviral therapy and recreational substance use in gay men's practice, arguing that pleasure, self-medication, and experimentation with the conditions of life are concerns that cut across outdated distinctions between pharmaceutical drugs and illicit drugs. Meanwhile, the stigmatised and criminalised status of HIV-positive sex, gay sexuality and illicit drug use produces paranoid subjects and effectively endangers the health and wellbeing of those affected. It must be countered. Paying attention to the collective experiments of drug users is likely to be much more generative.
I wrote this piece for a collection called Long Term, edited by Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, who invited me to write something about living with HIV.
practices, and thus have more chance of being taken up. It also enables a more dynamic and responsive approach to the practice of bodies and pleasures.
Please click on link above ABSTRACT [homotectonic] for copy of the chapter.
Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.
Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically and historically detailed case studies, the book examines how new technologies and scientific artifacts – such as antiretroviral therapy, digital hookup apps and research methods – mediate sexual encounters and shape the worlds and self-practices of men who have sex with men.
Rather than debunking scientific practices or minimizing their significance, The Gay Science approaches these practices as ways in which we ‘learn to be affected’ by HIV. It explores what knowledge practices best engage us, move us and increase our powers and capacities for action. The book includes an historical analysis of drug use as a significant element in the formation of urban gay cultures; constructivist accounts of the emergence of barebacking and chemsex; a performative response to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and its uptake; and, a speculative analysis of ways of thinking and doing sexual community in the digital context.
Combining insights from queer theory, process philosophy and science and technology studies to develop an original approach to the analysis of sexuality, drug use, public health and digital practices, this book demonstrates the ontological consequences of different modes of attending to risk and pleasure. It is suitable for those interested in cultural studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, digital culture, public health and drug and alcohol studies.
Kane Race is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the convenor of the Queer Contingent of Unharm and the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (2009) and Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water (with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter, 2015).
The book considers the assemblage and emergence of a mass market for water, from the invention of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle in 1973 to the development of “hydration science” that accompanied the rise of jogging in the United States. It looks at what bottles do in the world, tracing drinking and disposal practices in three Asian cities with unreliable access to safe water: Bangkok, Chennai, and Hanoi. And it considers the possibility of ethical drinking, examining campaigns to “say no” to the bottle and promote the consumption of tap water in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Keywords: biopower; normalization; genealogy; bodies; identity; power/knowledge
Drawing on my experience of living with HIV for over two decades, this essay discusses the forms of anxiety and concern that emerged in 1996 in the context of the introduction of HIV combination antiretroviral therapy around the use of so-called 'drug cocktails'. It shows how these concerns reflect broader anxieties about increasing sexual activity between men at this time. This event happens to kickstart a corresponding problematisation of gay men's use of recreational drugs– another sort of 'drug cocktail' - on the same basis. I see the present moral panic over chemsex as the latest instalment of this discourse.
The piece demonstrates the analogous character of antiretroviral therapy and recreational substance use in gay men's practice, arguing that pleasure, self-medication, and experimentation with the conditions of life are concerns that cut across outdated distinctions between pharmaceutical drugs and illicit drugs. Meanwhile, the stigmatised and criminalised status of HIV-positive sex, gay sexuality and illicit drug use produces paranoid subjects and effectively endangers the health and wellbeing of those affected. It must be countered. Paying attention to the collective experiments of drug users is likely to be much more generative.
I wrote this piece for a collection called Long Term, edited by Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, who invited me to write something about living with HIV.
practices, and thus have more chance of being taken up. It also enables a more dynamic and responsive approach to the practice of bodies and pleasures.
Please click on link above ABSTRACT [homotectonic] for copy of the chapter.
The exemplification of queer counterpublics in the critical literature draws extensively on the cultural forms of late twentieth-century urban sexual subcultures in the West, pre-Internet. This paper aims to distil some key principles from this work and consider how they might be taken forward and enacted in the present context, given the increasing prominence of sexual media and hookup apps as constituent elements of gay sexual culture.
Actor-network theory and queer theory might appear to be incommensurable pursuits. Sexual bodies-their practices, pleasures, vulnerabilities, constraints-have never been an abiding interest or explicit focus within the branch of Science & Technology Studies most closely associated with ANT. And while both fields are thoroughly indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, the ethnographic approach to the making of science, technology, facts and realities that is a hallmark of ANT produces different emphases than those typically found within queer theory. Where ANT draws attention to the material associations and practical relations that transform contingent relations into durable, concrete realities, queer theorists tend to stress the overarching power of the ideological, normative, disciplinary, discursive and/or psychic structures that produce queer lives as abject, vulnerable and suspect within prevailing social worlds. In this chapter I argue that ANT’s insistence on the contingency of relations among human and non-human actants might help break the stranglehold of totalization sometimes said to characterise queer theorists’ take on heteronormativity. This could generate constructive new forms of attention to projects of ‘queer world-making’ as well as the publics (or ‘counterpublics’) such projects call forth or depend upon. In the first part I conduct a close reading of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s influential (1998) essay ‘Sex in Public’ – perhaps the most robust and compelling early attempt to bring queer theory into articulation with key traditions of social theory – alongside congruent work by Sara Ahmed (2014), with a view to bringing out the activity of non-human actants in the ‘buffer zones’ and ‘elaborate support systems’ these essays rally against. Following ANT, I ask, might these be understood, at least in part, as infrastructures? Worlds capable of sustaining queer lives are meanwhile said to be composed of cultures, communities, arrangements and/or publics that this literature characterises as ‘fragile and ephemeral’. While ANT could arguably help remedy such fragility by providing insights into how stronger worlds or realities are built and sustained, in the second part of this chapter I suggest that ANT could benefit just as significantly from a better appreciation of the critical necessity and/or disruptive effects of these worlds ‘assembled out of the experience of being shattered,’ as Ahmed puts it (2014); the ‘alter-ontologies’ wrought from queer experiments in intimacy.
Participants will consider key problems and controversies punctuating this history, and explore how different analytic and methodological approaches participate in – and/or attempt to transform – the formation of these problems.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have enhanced their familiarity with key concepts and approaches in HIV social research, queer theory and actor-network theory (Science & Technology Studies). They will be introduced to ways of using these literatures to devise new approaches to HIV and drug research that engage with, and intervene constructively into, sexual practices, cultures and public health problems as currently practiced.
To read this paper, visit homotectonic.com – the blogpost is called PATHOLOGICAL
I’m sharing Exceptional Sex here
https://homotectonic.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/exceptional-sex1.pdf
because I think the analysis if offers remains topical, but the text itself is hard to access in electronic form. Please consider purchasing the book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, from Duke UP 2009.