Strange Intimacies: On Neoliberalism and Risky Sex Between Men

Abstract

Approaching risky sex between men through pathologizing models produces inadequate understandings of these practices. Instead, this paper analyzes unsafe sex between men through a dual approach— affective and political— asking 1) What kinds of bonds and bodily (in)capacities are forged by these practices, and 2) Decades into the HIV/AIDS pandemic, how can the forms of agency and moral reasoning they deploy be understood within the neoliberal present? The paper argues that unsafe sex is a form of negotiating and dwelling with precarity according to market-based models of risk management and distribution.