About

This is Kane Race’s blog on the materialisation of gay lives [Follow me on Twitter @kanerace]

I set up homotectonic as a place to unload (or is that upload?) work in process and random thoughts about the making and remaking of gay identities and subjectivities in the context of new medical and technological developments.  It extends what I began in my book Pleasure Consuming Medicine, which aimed to bring an account of everyday lives and pleasures to bear critically on medical prescription and enforcement.  But I needed a place to do this in real-time, in process, in exchange with whoever is interested. Mainly to keep pace with what is emerging from the strange and ongoing encounters between homos and new technological and biomedical infrastructures.

Homo: because this blog is about all-male sex cultures: the identities and desires of gay men, or ‘men who have sex with men’ – which is probably more apt as a descriptor, because changing identifications and disidentifications with the term ‘gay’ are processes that should remain open for analysis.

Tectonic: because I want to keep track of significant shifts in our social geography – some seismic, some more subtle.  All those lateral movements and unexpected convergences, collisions and eruptions that make up new practices, identities, pleasures and modes of relating.

But also because it connects tec, which evokes technology, to tonic, which references medicine and intoxication (some of my central interests) AND ALSO serves as an etymological mind-fuck that opens up a whole spectrum of compelling associations:

tonic (adj.) 1640s, “relating to or characterized by muscular tension,” from Gk. tonikos “of stretching,” from tonos “a stretching” (see tenet). The meaning “maintaining the healthy firmness of tissues” is recorded from 1680s, first extended 1756 to “having the property of restoring to health.” The noun meaning “a tonic medicine” is attested from 1799. The musical sense is first attested 1760, from tone (q.v.). Related: Tonicity.

There you have it.  Tension. Stretching. Muscularity. Bodily tissue. Health. Medicine.  Music.  All key players, processes, investments or topics in the modes of mattering in which this blog participates. Driven by specific tenets, which might be worth trying to get explicit about. And aiming towards a certain tonicity. Tonicity: how particles vibrate and move together to achieve moments of consistency.  Or inconsistency, depending on what else is happening.

What’s materialising among gay men now?