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Barebacking with Weber: Re-enchanting the rational sexual order

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Abstract

Sexual health discourses have become a defining part of many gay men’s sex lives. These discourses have effectively linked gay identity to HIV/AIDS discourses through telling most gay men how to rationally have sex and how to routinely get tested. However, some gay men who bareback – the choice often made not to use a condom – engage in condomless sex despite these larger discourses. Through using Weber’s theories on rationalization, I explicate how sexual health and HIV/AIDS discourses are calculable, efficient systems that are about protecting the public good. I show how this rationalized sexual health system disciplines pleasure and intimacy. Through this disciplining, I illuminate how sexual public health has disenchanted sex, specifically for some gay men, where some of these men who bareback may be attempting to find re-enchantment in this disenchanted sexual world. Through this Weberian framework, barebacking may be seen as an act that can allow for the re-exploration of personability, intimacy, eroticism and love.

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Notes

  1. The literature and argument put forth in this article is about a public health discourse of HIV/AIDS within many Western countries. The public health framework of HIV/AIDS is not universal. For example, in many African countries, HIV/AIDS is understood mainly through heterosexual transmission (Gisselquist and Potterat, 2003).

  2. See Hamblin and Somerville (1991) for an analysis of the compulsory reporting of HIV infection in Canada and how a compulsory system does not guarantee more accurate information of people infected as it may scare people from even getting tested.

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Andrew Robinson, B. Barebacking with Weber: Re-enchanting the rational sexual order. Soc Theory Health 12, 235–250 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2014.4

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