TY - CONF
T1 - Viral Masculinity: Who are the ‘Real Men’ Who Want to Get HIV?
T2 - Doing Sex: Men, Masculinity and Sexual Practices
AU - Garcia Iglesias, Jaime
PY - 2017/7/14
Y1 - 2017/7/14
N2 - Bugchasing is defined as the practice, among gay men, of performing unprotected anal intercourse with the intent of contracting HIV. A extreme sexual fetish, it has now become a major concern among the gay community (Dean 2009). Bugchasing lies at theinterface between masculinity, sexuality, race, and health studies, and yet there is little scholarship on the phenomenon, outside the fields of psychoanalysis (Tompso 2004) and public health (Bourne et al. 2014). This paper employs a multidisciplinary approach, combining a variety of sources (from sex stories to interviews) to highlight the ways in which the bugchasing community adapts and reworks mainstream heterosexual and queer notions of masculinity to deploy an alternative and highly fetishized perspective of sexual interaction and aesthetics.In particular, the focus of this piece is the practices through which bugchasers construct their alternative masculinity. Among others, these include: agency (who infects and who is infected), pain (who can take it rougher), and viral load (who has the most virus in their bodies). However, bugchasing masculinity is complex and, at times, multilayered: men who can “fuck rough” are praised with attributes of endurance and violence, and yet the community employs maternal language to describe the actual infection, with expressions such as “breeding” and “poz babies,” as well as terms such as “bitch” and “slut” as, arguably, affirmative and empowering terms.Departing from canonical considerations of masculinity in the gay community and sexuality, I will close-read textual and graphic materials to provide a taxonomy of the ways in which the bugchasing community adapts and performs masculinity. Through these, I will discuss the ways in which bugchasing both adopts mainstream commonplaces and develops alternative and fetishized performances of masculinity that are intertwined with HIV/AIDS and its voluntary transmission.
AB - Bugchasing is defined as the practice, among gay men, of performing unprotected anal intercourse with the intent of contracting HIV. A extreme sexual fetish, it has now become a major concern among the gay community (Dean 2009). Bugchasing lies at theinterface between masculinity, sexuality, race, and health studies, and yet there is little scholarship on the phenomenon, outside the fields of psychoanalysis (Tompso 2004) and public health (Bourne et al. 2014). This paper employs a multidisciplinary approach, combining a variety of sources (from sex stories to interviews) to highlight the ways in which the bugchasing community adapts and reworks mainstream heterosexual and queer notions of masculinity to deploy an alternative and highly fetishized perspective of sexual interaction and aesthetics.In particular, the focus of this piece is the practices through which bugchasers construct their alternative masculinity. Among others, these include: agency (who infects and who is infected), pain (who can take it rougher), and viral load (who has the most virus in their bodies). However, bugchasing masculinity is complex and, at times, multilayered: men who can “fuck rough” are praised with attributes of endurance and violence, and yet the community employs maternal language to describe the actual infection, with expressions such as “breeding” and “poz babies,” as well as terms such as “bitch” and “slut” as, arguably, affirmative and empowering terms.Departing from canonical considerations of masculinity in the gay community and sexuality, I will close-read textual and graphic materials to provide a taxonomy of the ways in which the bugchasing community adapts and performs masculinity. Through these, I will discuss the ways in which bugchasing both adopts mainstream commonplaces and develops alternative and fetishized performances of masculinity that are intertwined with HIV/AIDS and its voluntary transmission.
KW - masculinity
KW - HIV
KW - fetish
KW - bugchasing
M3 - Paper
ER -