Bareback has taken on multiple theoretical contours since being anointed as a legitimate object of academic analysis in Tim Dean’s 2009 seminal work, Unlimited Intimacy. Bareback has been approached as a subculture, an ideology, an attitude, a metaphor, a literality, a punk practice, a snuff politics, a mode of cultural transmission, a register of jouissance, a breeding ground for fantasies: in short, as a drive, a philosophy, a pedagogy, a poetics. The Bareback Now symposium aims to consider this complex field in its shifting manifestations and ancillary praxes, from chemsex to pigsex, from virility narratives to fantasies of subversion, from a normative to a radical practice and (possibly) back again. What is the contemporary function of this practice that has become all but the default position in many a queer sex scene? What has (be)come of barebacking in a context of omnipresent antiretrovirals and pre-exposure prophylaxis, but also of new forms of intimacy risks?

speakers

Antonios Poulios (psychoanalyst/University of Crete)
Misha Kavka (University of Amsterdam)
Elliot Evans (University of Birmingham)
Gary Needham (University of Liverpool)

For more info: d.semerene@uva.nl