Barebacking's Late Style

It has been a decade since the publication of Tim Dean's Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009). Much has changed: in the United States, same-sex marriage is now legal nationwide, and globally, the development of pre-exposure prophylaxis has made sex "safer"—at least for those who can afford it. Ricky Varghese's Raw tracks how the discourse of condomless anal intercourse has changed accordingly. What emerges from this well-edited collection is an awareness that barebacking is no longer scandalous, in either academic circles or public life. When once it was dangerous, now it is merely decadent. Today it theorizes as much as it titillates. Reading Raw, one cannot help but think that the discourse of barebacking has entered what critics such as Theodor Adorno would call a "late style," the moment when a discourse refuses a "harmonious synthesis" and productively resides between its culmination and its diminution (1937 [2002]: 567). Adorno described it as the "catching fire" that occurs when an artist nears the limit of their aesthetic (567). Thus, it is telling that Varghese organizes his collection's eleven essays into four categories of "limits": biopolitical, bodily, pornographic, and psychoanalytical and pedagogical. If there is something new about barebacking, it is that it is no longer new. Indeed, there's something about the concept that is just about to fall apart.

As Varghese notes in his introduction, "the writers of the various chapters can't agree on what barebacking is and what it is not" (xxi). To him, this disagreement shows the increasing elasticity of the term as much as it does a discursive uneasiness. We may not be able to define it, in part, because barebacking, much like other discourses of pleasure, "feels excised from the conversation as though it is either in excess of the conversation or a vestigial part of it" (xxv). Jonathan A. Allan's essay takes this issue up graphically, noting how contemporary medical discourse on circumcision plays on tropes of "primitivism and infection" to paradoxically assert that the removal of the foreskin is the health equivalent of a "natural condom" that will protect the circumcised from sexually transmitted diseases (5). Octavio R. González traces how the discourse of pre-exposure prophylaxis still relies on narratives of contagion: through the figure of the "Truvada whore," "we invoke a new villain, with a new name, but the song remains the same" (33). And Frank G. Karioris explores how barebacking is no longer exclusive to homosexual sex: examining tensions about condom use in heterosexual pornography, he notes that a binary of "virility/virality" encourages critics to ask "Who is risking what? Who takes on the risk?" (52–53). What we find in these essays is how the recycling of stock tropes and stories attempts to constrain a practice that has become unruly.

Raw's essays on bodily and pornographic limits engage with substances that are far from vestigial. Rinaldo Walcott explores the figure of "Black cum-joy" and reminds us that "Black sex is usually conceived as a dangerous kind of sexual activity" entrenched with "talk of death" (74–75). Elliot Evans, through the writing of Monique Wittig and Patrick Califia, outlines how blood is a "bridge between the self and other" that "can only be crossed in the structure of fantasy" (111). Evangelos Tziallas writes that with the rise of amateur and quasi-amateur pornography, both viewer expectation and demand has changed such that pornographic "narrative is seen as the purview of commercial safe sex productions, and a hindrance to the real" (123). Paul Morris and Susanna Paasonen explore how the pleasure depicted in bareback MSM pornography produces a queer optimism through an "unreasonable" politics (146). Yet the visual display of barebacking is certainly not as liberating as they suggest. The culmination of barebacking, the ejaculation of semen into the anal canal—what Gareth Longstaff in his essay calls the "splutter" of bareback porn—is more the attempt to "connect, implicate, and haunt the other . . . a...