Lupine and zig-zag lines: queer affects in Alain Guiraudie’s L’inconnu du lac and Rester vertical

In this article I investigate how a theory of becomings-animal operates in a number of contemporary queer French films by director Alain Guiraudie (L’inconnu du lac (2013) and Rester vertical (2016)). In particular I explore how a becomings-animal’s association with a Deleuzian theory of affect enhances our understanding of queer intimacy. The aim of this article is to reposition queer intimacy as an ontology outside – outside synthetic and vertical lines of filiation and kinship and inside the disjunctive lines of the outside (what is irregular, random, rural, cosmic). Drawing at first on intimacy as an ontological non-relationality (Bersani 2008; 2009) and on the idea of separation as an ontological necessity of queer intimacy (John Paul Ricco 2017), I want to rethink queer intimacy as exposure outwards – an intimacy to and towards. Within this exteriorization of intimacy, my methodology will rely on the affective power of a Deleuzian theory of lines

'The Neighbourhood Cums: Ding Dong! Dick's Here!': SketchySex and the online/offline cultures of group sex between gay men

This article explores contemporary sexual practices of group sex between gay men facilitated through the cruising apps and websites Grindr and BarebackRT, and its depiction by the gay porn studio SketchySex. The article discusses themes of community among those partaking in group sex, tracing historical cultural shifts as neoliberal ideologies have developed, as well as focusing on the shifting understandings of public and private spaces. The article argues that gentrification has forced once-public activities into the private home, which brings unique risks for individuals to negotiate, and considers the extent to which digital technologies have helped to facilitate this. This culminates in a critique of the diversity of SketchySex, who seem to be selective in the types of people who can attend their parties; this is read alongside the practices of gay men cruising online, and seeks to identify a community utilizing their public/private, online/offline spaces for more radical sexual ends

Accessing homosexuality: truth, evidence and the legal practices for determining refugee status - the case of Ioan Vraciu

This article focuses on the events surrounding a homosexual Romanian man's attempt to be recognized as a refugee in Britain. Numerous themes emerge such as the nature of authenticity, knowledge, identity, pleasure, evidence and the homosexual refugee as being caught in between two legal apparatuses (that is, fleeing from the hostility of one legal regime and then trying to gain refugee status, and thus legal protection, via a British Immigration Tribunal). In this article, the corporeality and sensuality of legal practices are exposed in the form of 'practices of truth'. That is, in this case medico-legal 'living individuals' were to perceive, hear, speak, touch and penetrate the 'secrets' of Mr Vraciu's body in order to authenticate his sexual identity for the purposes of law. This case also demonstrates the existence of a differend between what I describe as the self-knowledge of homosexuality and the 'legal' fact-based, or authorized knowledge of homosexual identity produced through practices of truth