Click here for HIV status: Shifting templates of sexual negotiation
Section snippets
Approach
This inquiry emerges at the intersection of cultural studies and public health. At the centre of the analysis are observations drawn from participation in gay social settings, including online cruising on the two most active and popular cruising sites in Sydney, Gaydar.com and Manhunt.net. At the time of writing, these sites are the most widely accessed gay cruising sites among Sydney gay men, with an average of 1000 local participants each on Friday and Saturday nights. To extend the analysis
From cruising to browsing
In many ways, online cruising is analogous to other practices of socializing for sex familiar to gay men, in that it brings certain aspects of consumer subjectivity to bear on sexual relations. In this sense, it follows the trend of the bathhouse or sauna, which sexualized the logic of the shopping arcade.7
Sean: It's great in terms of accessibility 24/7… I can organise my sex around my work schedule. It's also like a shopping cart. You can go, ‘OK, I'm interested in
Negative expectations of disclosure
A number of the HIV-negative men interviewed in the QUICKIE study were versed in a traditional policy of assuming any of their casual partners could be HIV-positive. The policy was usually situated in terms of the norms of non-disclosure that have operated historically in many casual sex contexts. For these men, the use of condoms tended to substitute for the need to know their partner's HIV status. This was true even of some of the younger men.
Caleb: I have a thing about disclosure, because I
Sexual sociability and biosociality online
Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas have used the term ‘digital bio-citizenship’ to describe practices of prudence and responsibility in which ‘somatic individuals’ draw on medical knowledge and digital technologies in order to manage and act upon the implications of their corporeal being.13 Such regimes of self-management would appear to intersect with practices of intimacy on internet dating sites such as positivesingles.com and safesexpassport.com, where individuals with (or
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank his co-researchers on the QUICKIE study, Martin Holt and Diana Bernard, for allowing him to use material from that study here. He also thanks Michael Hurley and an anonymous reviewer from Emotion, Space & Society for their suggestions. The QUICKIE study was funded by a grant from NSW Health.
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