Pork to the Future: A review of João Florêncio, Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig

It is difficult to overstate the impact that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has had on gay erotic culture. Whether one experienced life in the bathhouses before its outbreak or came of age in the chastened era of "safe sex" and antiretroviral therapy, for the past forty years HIV has served as the principal risk contouring not only gay men's pleasures and intimacies but also their politics. However, as João Florêncio argues in his fascinating study Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (2020), the rise of new antiretroviral therapies, which effectively prevent the transmission of HIV between serodiscordant sexual partners, has catalyzed a significant change in that history. Comprising the second entry in Routledge's new Masculinity, Sex, and Popular Culture series, which explores masculinities at the conjunction of texts and practices, Florêncio's book provides a sophisticated account of the gay masculinities now proliferating in the bars, backrooms, and pornographies of Europe and North America, an account of erotic practices that echo the relational experiments that characterized gay public sex during the 1970s. While facing significant criticism both from national cultures that prefer their gay men sexlessly monogamous and from gay leaders who view pig sex as self-indulgent backsliding, gay "pig" masculinities, as Florêncio terms them, have enabled forms of queer world-making that harbor a potential for ethical and political transformation. Far from idealistic, Florêncio is in fact well aware that gay pig masculinities are inextricable from a mode of modern biopower that operates at the level not just of bodies and populations but also of hormones and molecules. Still, as he passionately and often convincingly argues, it's in the pig's creative use of antiviral drugs, and not in the screeds of Larry Kramer or the white papers of Mayor Pete, that many gay men have found what HIV and the phobic politics it inspired threatened to deny them: a queerer path to the future.

So, what exactly is a pig? A pig is what a pig does, and what a pig does is revel in excess. More precisely, and unlike other subcultural subjectivities that entail the acquisition of appropriate apparel or a particular body shape, one never simply "is" a pig the way one might be a twink or a bear; instead, one engenders gay pig masculinity through erotic practices using those areas of the body most intensely policed by shame and disgust. As Florêncio succinctly puts it: "gay 'pigs' ground their masculinity in their holes" (79). Accordingly, the pig's erotic repertoire includes not only rough fucking and fisting, but also—and perhaps more importantly—the ingestion of recreational drugs and the exchange of body fluids, including piss, shit, and cum. Yet gay pig masculinity isn't about the egoinflating pleasures of pissing on others, as normative masculinities might have it; instead, it treats such practices as a means of self-augmentation that repeatedly overruns the imaginary boundaries of the body. Pig sex thus exemplifies the flows of Guy Hocquenghem's deoedipalized "groups," for which the anus and anal pleasure supplant castration as the privileged metaphor for the production of subjectivity (Hocquenghem 110). Put differently, gay pig masculinities eschew the phallus and its false promise of coherent identity for the disorienting uncertainties of becoming. In that regard, a pig's work is never done; there's always another stranger to welcome, another hole to penetrate, and another load to take. It's in the practice of such a radical openness to the world that Florêncio locates an ethics of porosity that recalls and revitalizes the experiments in erotic relationality conducted among queers during the 1970s. While conditioned by the biopolitical management of HIV, becoming-pig enacts, borrowing from Michel Foucault, an "aesthetic of existence" that makes trouble for processes of normalization and control (qtd. in Florêncio 91).

As one might expect given Florêncio's background in art...