Party ‘n’ PlayOnline hook-up devices and the emergence of PNP

practices among gay men

Kane RaceDepartment of Gender & Cultural Studies

University of Sydney, Australia

The renunciative turn

– Popular discourses increasingly pin HIV preventionas

a possibility that relies on the renunciation of

substance use (and sometimes even casual sex!)

– To counter this, we need engaged analyses of

sex/drug cultures so that the possibilities of

safety/care that are immanent within these cultures

can be identified and fostered

Online hookup sites/apps/locative devices

A new(ish) infrastructure of the sexual encounter

– If institutions allocate resources and establish

hierarchies of authority

– Infrastructures produce capacities and shape

encounters in ways that become more or less

durable components of everyday routines

Party and Play (“PNP”)

• Also known as ”partying”, “wired play”, “chem sex”, “extended

sessions”

• At home; arranged online; involving one or more partners over

extended period of time; use of psychoactive substances

(typically crystal meth, smoked, GHB); pornography; etc. - a

specifically assembled erotic environment.

• About 15% - 20% of Sydney gay men had participated in PNP in

last 6 months

• Approached as a pathogenic site by public health literature

• Also a site for the elaboration of specific affective associations

2004

community ed poster NYC

• In social/political theory, the technological

object/commodity is typically positioned as

responsible for the demise of sociality,

community, politics, etc.

• An alternative approach asks “How do

objects/devices mediate sociality?” (Object-

oriented process studies)

Sex as play• “Looking to play?”

• Georg Simmel, “The sociology of sociability” ([1910]

1949) – role of play-form in the making of sociability

• Bruno Latour’s “associology”- challenges the notion that

“society” or “community” explains anything – rather

these formations need to be explained, by tracing their

assemblage.

Distinctive features/formations

• Pre-specification of practices and

desires

• Co-construction of fantasy/ erotic

speculation

• Wired play/ extended sessions

Serosorting

The emergence of undetectable identity

Sexual speculation

Generative encounters• “the crystallization of their fantasies in the texts that constitute

the vehicle for their interaction is akin to the joint construction

of a script” (P. Adam et al. 2011: 507).

• N.B Here desires, intentions and even identities do not precede

the online encounter in any simple sense, but can be

understood to emerge from it through a process of eventuation.

• (On eventuation see Race, “Complex events”, forthcoming this

year in Contemporary Drug Problems)

Group play/ extended sessions

What are some implications for HIV prevention and education?

• Requires a different form of health education than that which addresses

itself to the sovereign, intentional, calculative, rational-choice actor.

• It becomes impossible to classify any individual element in a sexual

assemblage as good or bad since their properties are emergent

• What matters is the manner in which various different elements come

together in an assemblage to generate specific effects (whether good or

bad) – and it is this coming together that requires specific attention and

vigilance.

• A training in potentialities (both promising and dangerous) – what I call

“speculative pragmatism”

• Promoting this mode of attention might become the goal of a new form of

sexual health and drug education.

Acknowledgements• This research has been supported by an Australian Research Council

Discovery Grant, “Changing Spaces of HIV Prevention” DP120101990.

• Thanks to the community of informants who have shared their

experiences and impressions of changes to sexual community and gay

sexual culture.

• Article based on this paper forthcoming this year in Sexualities

• Two related pieces forthcoming in Contemporary Drug Problems and

Culture, Health & Sexuality.