Category Archives: Devices and technology

May 3, 2013 · 9:32 am

Provocative Objects

Things are moving fast in the world of HIV prevention and sexual practice, with the introduction of new techniques such as Treatment as Prevention and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (billed as ‘a pill a day to prevent HIV infection’) being purposed for prevention purposes.  While the latter is not yet available in Australia, it has been the subject of a whole lot of controversy as well as some very provocative and creative cultural production in North America, including the My Life on PREP series by blogger Jake Sobo, who gives a fascinating account of how his perceptions, experiences, practices and theorisations of risk change as he starts using the drug for HIV prevention.  He really accounts for himself as a sexual subject “in process” and the result is both fascinating and informative.

promiscuous

If that wasn’t creative enough, check out this recent  Youtube clip, “The Key” adapted from one of Jake Sobo’s blogs, that positions PREP as an intervention into the forms of shame, sexual judgement and aversion to stigmatic identification that circulate in gay male domains like the online world and which could be seen to hamper effective HIV prevention.  Most of us know the territory, but as far as confronting these things, it’s been a while since I’ve seen an intervention this bold.  There’s much to admire about this clip – the funky  beats, the uncompromising confrontation of online dynamics and interaction, and the sharp analysis of how investment in normative ideals of intimacy can precipitate forms of self-deception around risk and sexual practice.

What I am less sure about is the invocation of PREP as THE key  - as though an exclusive – way of solving this problem of sexual stigma, shaming and aversion. I have huge admiration for this intervention, and I  have also been very interested in the provocative powers of PREP,  but I’m  keen to hear people’s responses to this clip.  How well does it handle your concerns about PREP?  What does and doesn’t it deal with?  What else might one need to know to consider engaging with this preventive strategy?  What issues or concerns does PREP raise for you?

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Filed under Affect, Antiretrovirals, Devices and technology, Engagement with medicine, Erogenous zones, HIV behavioural surveillance, Medicine and science, Self-medication, Sexual practice, The statistical imagination

April 1, 2013 · 10:06 am

When sex delivery systems don’t deliver

I’ve been thinking a lot in this project about the possibilities but also frustrations afforded by online cruising sites/ apps and how they are figuring in the ways gay men are presently organising their sexual and emotional lives. They can function as a great and effective way of hooking up with people (often not as effective as people would like!) but there is an abiding anger, sense of resentment and frustration about what they make us do, and what they don’t do, and how people behave when using this medium. All this even while many people understand the desire for casual or no-strings sex, and use these sites happily for these purposes themselves …  often in the ways they complain about in relation to the conduct of prospective partners!

I managed to dig up this old interview from an event back in 2010 hosted by SIDACTION in Paris where David Halperin, Barry Adam and a much earlier version of myself were interviewed in connection with a conference on homosexuality, social science and HIV.  Barry’s comments at the end of the interview have stuck with me ever since and I have been thinking about them more and more.  He raises the problem of how participants try to negotiate needs for connection and intimacy so evocatively:

“We often live in gay worlds which are quite efficient sex delivery systems but men then have to focus a great many of their emotional needs into this one avenue and that itself creates new risk situations which are again often inadvertent but that we are called upon to manage one way or another”

I love this way of formulating the problem: how to negotiate satisfying intimate lives in the context of hyper-efficient sex delivery systems?  It’s an ongoing and active question …

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Filed under Affect, Devices and technology, Online meeting sites, PNP culture, Sexual practice

March 27, 2013 · 11:09 am

Party and Play: new infrastructures of sexual sociability

Here’s what I’m thinking: in the form of an abstract submitted to an upcoming drugs conference.  Comments and ideas v welcome!

This paper traces the complex and shifting materialization of gay lives in the context of transformations in drug practices, drug policing and modes of sexual sociability over the past decade in Sydney, Australia.  I argue that the government of drug practices is bound up in complex ways with the materialization of sexualities, forms of community and identification, and modes of political consciousness and activism. I connect two processes that have had a marked effect on sexual sociability among men who have sex with men and queer communities in urban contexts: (1) the intensification of drug policing which is increasingly experienced as – and has been used as a pretext to conduct – a systematic assault on gay communal spaces and the ethos of dance culture, and (2) the emergence of online sex sites, which has made possible new, more secluded, and arguably more risky forms of at-home partying and drug consumption (‘PNP culture’).  Drawing on insights from science studies, I approach these developments as new sexual infrastructures, or infrastructures of intimacy, that can be seen to mediate sociosexual encounters in specific ways.  Where institutions allocate resources and establish hierarchies of authority, infrastructures facilitate and shape encounters in ways that become more or less durable even as their constructed and/or enacted nature is grasped.  What this analysis brings to science studies is an illustration of the implication of sociotechnical infrastructures and regulatory practices in the production of affective atmospheres – their ontological manifestation, effects and transformation.  In conclusion, I consider the significance of affective climates for harm reduction and what I have termed ‘counterpublic health’.  I argue that the concept of ‘affective climates’ provides a more nuanced perspective on the ways in which stigma may be understood to interfere with collective elaborations of care.

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Filed under Affect, Devices and technology, Drug dogs, Engagement with medicine, Medicine and science, Online meeting sites, Parties, PNP culture, Police, Self-medication, Sexual practice, Theory

June 7, 2012 · 5:41 am

Sexual Media

I’m currently designing a poster presentation for the International AIDS Conference in Washington in July 2012.  It’s a tricky forum and a tricky genre: you can’t be too ‘text heavy’ – a bit rough when text is your tool of the trade!  Anyway, here is what I have put together, in the way of text, based on thinking emerging from the Changing Spaces project.  It’s mainly a descriptive/framing piece, where I coin the term ‘sexual media’.  For the poster itself, wonderfully designed by Jamie Carroll, click on the title.  Thoughts and input welcome….

Fantasy and Practice:

The use of sexual media among Sydney gay men

The internet has emerged as a significant mechanism enabling male-to-male sexual encounters. But few studies have investigated how participation in sexual media is shaping approaches to sexual practice and forms of sexual sociability. This study treats sexual media as a significant new infrastructure of the sexual encounter.   By investigating how people are experiencing and relating to this medium, we gain insight into some of the sociotechnical arrangements through which people encounter and engage with prospective partners – and with HIV.

About the study

Changing Spaces of Gay Life is an ethnographic project that began in January 2012 and is ongoing.  It consists of participant observation, interviews with Sydney gay men, and analysis of sexual media. The project is funded by a 3-year Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and has been approved by the University of Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee (Protocol No. 14718).

What are sexual media?

Like social media, sexual media include web-based and mobile technologies that enable dialogue and interaction between subscribers for erotic and/or social purposes.  But unlike social media, these media appeal primarily to intentions to construct offline erotic relations.  Thus, details such as the location of users are often prominent.  While sexual media are generally designed to facilitate offline encounters, some functions are geared to online interaction exclusively constituting erotic practices in their own right (for example camming).  Rapid access to pornography creates new proximities between representation, consumption and interaction in some forms of engagement.

Researching risk in the sexual media environment

The field tends to be divided between studies that focus on the textual manifestation of risky eroticism (for example studies of barebacking symbolism)[1] and studies of ‘actual behaviour’ (social and behavioural research).  The fetishization of risk uncovered in textual studies is often countered by a sociological and/or epidemiological insistence on the distinction between fantasy and practice.  But this insistence, while important, can betray a reluctance to engage with fantasy as a meaningful dimension of practice.  Approaching sexual media as embodied and enacted in specific ways is important.

Embedded and continuous

In contrast to early understandings of cyberspace, sexual media can be approached as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces.  There are numerous relays between online and offline encounters, which frequently frame and animate each other.  To the extent that participants experience sexual media as ‘merely virtual’, this is something that needs to be socially explained as a practical accomplishment rather than taken as a given.[2]  The question is how participants themselves make and enact distinctions between the real and the virtual, fantasy and practice.

Quiet sorting

All-male sexual media invariably index social space, creating an experience of gay presence even in contexts of apparent absence.  By investing everyday space with ongoing potential for gay sexual and social encounters, sexual media addresses the normativity of social space in novel ways. Users can stage their online presence to their own advantage, gradually releasing information about appearance and interests to potential partners.[3] Many participants value the capacity to maintain anonymity while selectively releasing significant details such as sexual interests, HIV status, drug use, ethnicity and age.

Some sites prompt details such as HIV status and even viral load, suggesting practices such as serosorting and strategic positioning. [4]  Some sites are constructed as ‘hotter’ and more effective for hook-up purposes than others.  One ‘barebacking’ site formatted to enable serosorting listed over 1200 ‘HIV-negative’ Sydney subscribers, some of whom described participation as exciting but challenging in terms of their desire to maintain HIV-negative status.

Moods of engagement

Participants described different practices of use: browsing, filtering, random chat and background use (“basically like fishing.  You put your photo out there and then you hope that someone’s gonna try and get your attention”).  These were enacted in the context of particular everyday moods – distraction, relieving boredom, fantasizing – in addition to looking for sex.  The relative anonymity of the medium affords the opportunity for particular sorts of discourse (e.g. ‘anonymous socializing’, consisting of sexual talk and picture swapping, and governed by different rules and assumptions than face-to-face interaction).   Sexual media were also useful for arranging ‘wired play’, a particular genre of sexual practice consisting of more focussed searching and browsing, use of drugs such as crystal meth, multiple consecutive encounters, and (for some) group scenes.

Conclusions

Understanding how sexual media is shaping sexual practice involves understanding how it is used, including the affective dimensions of use.  Sexual media are engaged in the context and creation of everyday moods, which impact what takes place and how.  Sometimes they are valued as a fantasy space, enabling flirting and ‘idle chat’.  At other times the ‘capacity to deliver’ is prioritised, and this may affect choice of sites, partner selection, and sorting criteria.

[1] T Dean (2009) Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the subculture of barebacking.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[2] D Miller & D Slater (2000) The Internet: an ethnographic approach. Oxford : Berg.

[3] M Davis, G Hart, G Bolding, L Sherr & J Elford (2006) E-dating, identity and HIV prevention.  Sociology of Health and Illness 28 (4): 457 – 478

[4] K Race (2010) Click here for HIV status: Shifting templates of sexual negotiation.  Emotion, Space  & Society 3 (1): 7 – 14.

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Filed under Affect, Devices and technology, Engagement with medicine, Eroticism and fantasy, Online meeting sites, PNP culture, Sexual practice

April 8, 2012 · 9:52 pm

Reluctant objects

This is the introduction to a paper I am developing for this week’s HIV Social Research conference, Silence and Articulation, on the topic of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis.  Would love to hear any input or thoughts you may have on the topic!

Update: Here is a link to a DRAFT COPY of the full paper.

To see a live version of this paper delivered as guest speaker of the CIHR Social Research Centre in HIV Prevention, Social Drivers Speakers Series on 11 April 2013 in Vancouver, visit Reluctant Objects

This is a speculative paper that attempts to make sense of gay men’s relation to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (“PREP”).  It emerges from a series of encounters and an overall impression, based on my participation in gay culture, of what I would venture as a surprising state of disengagement with PREP.  PREP, I will argue, takes the shape of a reluctant object: an object that may well make a tangible difference to people’s lives, but whose promise is so threatening or confronting to enduring habits of getting by in this world, that it provokes aversion, avoidance, even condemnation and moralism.  I will suggest that thinking about gay men’s engagement, or rather dis-engagement, with PREP stands to tell us much about gay men’s self-understanding as subjects of risk in the present moment of the HIV epidemic: If, for Althusser, interpellation describes the ‘hey you!’ moment when a person recognises themselves as a subject of official discourse, we might approach this topic as an inquiry into uninterpellation: the conditions in which one is led to turn away, to linger in a state of non-confrontation, to avoid recognising oneself as a subject of risk.  The object of PREP also forces us to contend with what scares us, not only about risk, but about sex: the ways in which condoms, for example, have operated in the citizenship arena not only as a latex but also a symbolic prophylactic  against the terrifying prospect of unbridled homosexuality.

By positioning PREP as a reluctant object I do not mean to suggest, of course, that PREP is an unproblematic object, or that concerns about PREP are unfounded.  It is certainly the case that PREP poses considerable challenges with regard to its effective implementation, use, and resourcing, that are by now well recognised in the international field.  The issues of non-adherence, risk compensation, unwanted toxicity, and the possible development of resistant virus in the context of sero-conversion and suboptimal treatment are real and must be addressed.  However, in this paper I bracket these concerns, primarily because these are not the concerns I have encountered when raising the issue of PREP with HIV-negative sexual partners and friends.  People outside the HIV sector haven’t even got that far in thinking about it, in my experience.  Rather, what I am attempting to understand is the affective reaction with which news of PREP is often greeted: a reaction of aversion – often powerful aversion and repudiation – among men who are otherwise familiar with, and often have sensible and well-considered approaches to, the challenge of HIV prevention.  Understanding this reaction may be useful for thinking through how to present PREP to the relevant publics, and have the added advantage of framing HIV prevention as a matter of affective attachments and investments: i.e. how people come to attach themselves to particular objects, practices, devices, identities and positions in their attempts to avoid HIV infection.

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Filed under Affect, Antiretrovirals, Devices and technology, Engagement with medicine, HIV behavioural surveillance, Medicine and science, Self-medication, Sexual practice

March 10, 2012 · 10:33 am

Cataloguing desire

Has anyone seen the recent biopic J.Edgar?  It’s the story of J. Edgar Hoover, who was head of the FBI between 1935 and 1972 and who was also a rumoured homosexual.  At one point early on in the film, the young J. Edgar is depicted taking his soon-to be assistant, Helen Gandy, on a date to see the card catalogue system he claimed to have invented for the Library of Congress.  (Gee, some date!)  In a bid to show off the ingenuity and efficiency of the system, he asks Gandy to propose any topic for him to search within the archives.  ”Indiscretion!” she proposes, and in a matter of minutes, J. Edgar finds a book on the topic and retrieves it from the library shelves.  He then goes on the rhapsodise about how wonderful it would be if there were a card on every individual in the United States: how easy it would be to solve crimes if every individual were as easily identifiable as books in the library.

The film sets up an interesting set of tensions and associations between information retrieval, the catalogue, surveillance, indiscretion and homosexual expressivity.  The ‘theory’ of the film is that it is J. Edgar’s own inability to express his sexuality that leads to his obsessive interest in the private lives of others.  (This licences the film to go on obsessively to explore the private life of J.Edgar.  Not a happy thing, unless you like tales of repressed old gay men played by straight actors in bad ‘old person’ makeup….)

For me, this representation of the card catalogue connects in interesting ways to another historical figure who I’ve been researching, Sam Steward – a fascinating figure, and contemporary of J. Edgar Hoover’s, whose life is the topic of this recent brilliant biography by Justin Spring.  Steward was a literature professor, who became a tattoo artist and also a writer of erotic fiction.  He was friends with a range of prominent 20th c. figures, from Gertrude Stein to Alfred Kinsey.  He was also a bit of a gay lothario and lover of rough trade.

One of the best known features of Steward’s life was his keeping of The Stud File, a 746 cross-referenced card catalogue system in which he recorded details of every sexual partner he had between 1924 through 1974 – their measurements, attributes, what they did together, etc.  Steward used the catalogue system partly in order to refresh his memory and enable repeat encounters, partly as an upshot of his relentless enthusiasm for archiving.

This makes me think about the use of this device as part of male homosexual arrangements and erotic practice over the  20th century.  The catalogue emerges as a distinctive mechanism or what I would call an infrastructure of sexual encounter.  I’ve become fascinated with the place of the catalogue in the emergent homosexual subjectivity of the 20th c.  Just as fascinating, I think, is the desire to enumerate; and  the place of the statistical imagination in homosexual self-understanding more generally (I’ll blog about this some more another time).

Steward went on to become one the key informants of Alfred Kinsey, whose work is considered foundational for American sexology.  I’m struck by the sense in which Steward’s practice of cataloguing anticipates and informs the scientific methods of this nascent discipline.  For me the link to Kinsey connects in suggestive ways to the practices of HIV behavioural and epidemiological surveillance, which draw extensively on the techniques of sexology, and which have become the primary means of knowing about male-to-male sexual practice – a massive worldwide apparatus, intensively resourced and linked into policy, without which contemporary policy responses to HIV/AIDS would be unthinkable.

There’s a lot that can be said about this particular structure of scientific knowledge and the forms of authority it auspices (and I’ve begun to try to say some of it here and here): the sense in which the primary way in which we ‘know’ about sexual practice is by counting and measuring other people’s behaviour.  I’m constantly struck, for example, by the fact that we have so many people working in the HIV field who are regular participants in affected communities/cultures, but who are blocked if not actively discouraged (by the professional frames within which they work) from reflecting in any sort of sustained or explicit way on the making of their experience …as part of their work  .  You have to ask: what sort of engagement with sexual practice are these epistemological arrangements modelling?

But I am also interested in the sense in which Steward’s practice of cataloguing anticipates or presages another contemporary device or formal infrastructure which now plays a major part in the facilitation of all-male sexual encounters: the online hookup site; and in particular, the online profile …which can be viewed as an active participant in the contemporary shaping of gay sexual subjectivities.  Through the online profile, we catalogue ourselves – according to certain formats – and we use this device to facilitate sexual encounters, having it operate as the terms of our initial exposure to others.  Could the popular participation (not to mention forms of disaffection and critical engagement) that surround this infrastructure be more widely or critically generative?

The difference of course between J. Edgar and Sam Steward, or between behavioural surveillance and online cruising, is that in the latter instance what we have – at least potentially – is a case of inhabiting the catalogue: i.e. an explicit use of the catalogue for embodied and erotic purposes.

And so what I am becoming interested in is the politics that emerges when we acknowledge (or get explicit about) our inhabitation of the catalogue: When we reformulate or engage the catalogue as a device that is affective, erotic and specifically inhabited …

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Filed under Affect, Devices and technology, Eroticism and fantasy, HIV behavioural surveillance, Online meeting sites, The statistical imagination