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Calculating Risk:Barebacking, the Queer Male Subject, and the De/formation of Identity Politics David Oscar Harvey (bio) While watching the vampire film Daybreakers (dir. Michel Spierig and Peter Spierig, 2009), a moment gave me pause. A group of humans are poised at the entrance of a lair of sorts in which many vampires likely preside. One character asks naively, "Is it safe?" To which the Elvis (Willem Dafoe) replies, "About as safe as barebacking a five-dollar whore." The line of dialogue left me both offended and confused. Why I was offended concurrently was and was not simple to trace. The parallels drawn between sex workers, risk, and HIV infection unsettled me, as did the implicit association between vampires/death and barebacking in concert with HIV/AIDS.1 Yet, there was something else. Barebacking is typically considered to be unsafe anal sex between two men, and I was unsure how to confront its invocation in a heterosexual context. In an interview, Dafoe himself admits sharing a certain discomfort and disorientation about the dialogue: Cause I thought, "Can we say that?" . . . This word bareback, it's quite, quite specific. In fact, I'm not even sure, I know it more from . . . Oh, boy, um, it's kind of gay cruise parlor. I don't know if it's a hetero thing: bareback. Well, it's a phrase that deserves to be out there.2 [End Page 156] My own pause was not born of a general fussiness over the correct usage of language. Simply, I felt as though heterosexuals were encroaching upon homosexual history and culture, in the process belittling it. Unsafe heterosexual couplings are considered less risky (regarding HIV and the statistical likelihood of its transmission). Heterosex benefits from its status as a normative sexual behavior. It is thus far less prone to critique and has—or so I assumed—failed to include itself within the controversial social phenomenon of barebacking. In addition to the physical risk resides one psychic. The psychological duress is potentially much greater for men engaging in unsafe with men, as our culture has emphatically characterized such behavior as irrational and deadly. Finally, there is the risk that deals with the homosexual body in a manner less specific; here we speak of the social body or socius. Impressions of the homosexual as sexually reckless (an axiom for many) acts to countermand the increasing social acceptance with which our culture is beginning to regard "the gays."3 Whether or not cultural equality by way of a certain assimilationist sexual politics is desired by individual subjects, the risk posed by barebacking against such an initiative is incontrovertible. Yet against all these reasons to isolate barebacking unto a homosexual consideration, what of Dafoe's assertion that barebacking is worth "putting out there" in connection with heterosexuality? Might there be a benefit to thinking barebacking more broadly, departicularizing it from homosexuality? Despite the humanities' and queer theory's relative inattention to issues surrounding HIV/AIDS in recent years, a number of engaging and generative works on barebacking have emerged.4 My own contribution distinguishes itself from other writing by providing a theoretically and historically engaged genealogical overview of barebacking that discerns the peculiar way in which a particularized type of sexual behavior inaugurates a homosexual subculture and with it a manner of subjectivization and identity. Yet, this transformation (or amendment) of gay culture only occurred in the mid to late 1990s. If one posits, as I will, that barebacking existed as an alternative since the invention of safer sex, my essay also accounts for the period of gestation before the term circulated and the practice articulated its enactment, along with a series of stringent critiques, outright disavowals, and wild speculation.5 Once barebacking came to establish itself as a practice, it was initially evoked nearly uniformly in terms of intentionality or purposefully unsafe sex. Yet, I will show this evocation to be one-dimensional and inaccurate, as barebacking also describes more casual instances of unsafe sex, ones that are either accidental or fail to inspire the barebacking subject to identify as the member of [End Page 157] a subculture or as a barebacker.6 Before considering the validity of...
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