Drugs and Domesticity: Fencing the Nation

Indirect techniques for controlling individuals are advanced, promoted in terms of a moral vocabulary of ‘self-care’. One of the challenges for a national culture disaggregating in this way is how to contain, channel, even profit from the fears, resentment and anxiety that accompanies the loss of various prior forms of security. Here I explore, through analysis of a number of texts, the ways in which the representation of drugs is rallied to this purpose—inciting, concentrating and managing the fear surrounding changes to the economic, political, racial and sexual landscape of our time, while refiguring expectations, demarcations and investments in the public and private domains, and how these spheres of action are made to appear

Bottled water practices: Reconfiguring drinking in Bangkok households

This chapter examines bottled water practices in Bangkok: how they function practically; how they become meaningful and normalised; and how they interact with everyday household water routines. Single-serve bottled water is generally classified as a fast food commodity driven by the logics of the global beverage industry and designed to be consumed outside the house. Drinking water from a branded bottle is seen as a form of leisure consumption vastly different from turning on the tap and interacting with a state utility. But can bottles and taps be so easily set in opposition, one emblematic of a product, the other of a service? Is the distinction between these two drinking practices as clear-cut as this? What of the many places where state or commercial water utilities are non-existent, underdeveloped or unsafe? In these settings the meanings and efficacy of bottled water, bought from street vendors or home delivered, operate far beyond the registers of frivolous leisure consumption. This is just one of many examples that blur the distinction between taps and bottles and reveal the complexity of drinking water practices. Both bottles and taps deliver water and discipline its consumption via a variety of socio-technical and economic arrangements. And in many settings these different arrangements are inter-articulated, in the sense that they influence and interact with each other in complex and various ways. The challenge is to understand these interactions and to investigate the processes whereby drinking practices are made meaningful. Our interest is in how the matter ofthe plastic bottle comes to matter in different settings. How does a fully materialised account of drinking practices make it possible to think about the interactions between bottles and taps in more productive ways?A focus on drinking practices foregrounds the efficacy ofbottles in different settings. It also shows how objects and practices are mutually constitutive. This approach situates the water bottle within the routines and habits of everyday life and the ways in which artefacts participate in these routines and help constitute the social. Practices, then, are always more-than-human. Rather than see them as an expression of human agency or culture they have to be understood as complex associations of materials, technologies, norms and bodily habits that are sustained and modified through repeated performance or enactment. In the case of the plastic water bottle, these practices vary significantly according to context. As an object designed for portability and single use it is most alive outside the home. How, then, does the bottle mediate inside and outside, or stasis and mobility? And how does it impact on household water practices? In what ways does the tap as the endpoint of a service interact with the bottle as beverage or commodity? How do these distinctions reverberate on the 'economy ofqualities' (Callon et al. 2002) that variously values water? These are the larger questions driving this chapter, but first we explain our approach to the question of practice

The Gay Scientist: Kane Race on the unexpected possibilities of experimental intimacies

In this interview with Jamie Hakim, Kane Race talks about his most recent monograph The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments With the Problem of HIV (2018). In The Gay Science, he explores how practices of sex and intimacy between gay men are shifting amidst what he calls the changing infrastructures of gay life – digital, chemical and communal. As such the book is empirically oriented and looks at a wide range of topics from hook-up apps, to PreP to chemsex/party ‘n’ play, to the history and politics of Sydney’s Mardi Gras as they take place on the ground. Theoretically he blends the thought of philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzche with critical perspectives such as actor-network theory and Science and Technology Studies to argue that as scholars of sexual practice we need to pay more attention to what emerges within the contingencies of the assemblages and infrastructures that make sex between gay men possible. In so doing, the book is far more optimistic about gay sex and digital media then either popular media or influential strands of queer theory, offering path-breaking insight into the major concerns of this special issue on Chemsex Cultures

Sustaining safe practice: Twenty years on

Abstract This paper examines the ways in which populations at risk of HIV in the developed world have enculturated the knowledges and technologies of both the medical and the social sciences. By revisiting a number of review papers and by reviewing findings from a range of studies, we argue that gay men have appropriated information that has enabled them to sustain safe practices while they have eschewed information that has made maintenance difficult. The paper describes a range of risk reduction strategies and compares the responses of populations at risk of HIV in the years before the advent of highly active antiviral therapy (HAART) with their responses after the introduction of HAART in 1996. We concentrate our argument on the changing responses to HIV risk of gay men, although occasionally illustrate our argument with reference to the responses of injecting drug users. The responses of gay men to risk post-HAART-particularly those who reside in Australia-speak to the adoption of a range of considered strategies, not altogether safe, to reduce harm. We argue that such strategies need to be understood and addressed within a 'new' social public health, that is, a public health that takes what social analysis has to say seriously. The paper examines the differences between the traditional, the 'modern' epidemiological/clinical and the 'new' social or socio-cultural public healths and describes the tensions between the medical and the social science disciplines in their efforts to inform public health. Key concepts provided by social science such as agency (including individual and collective agency), alongside its methodological reflexivity are key to effective public health. The risk avoidance strategies adopted by gay men suggest a way forward by turning our attention to the ways in which medicine is taken in(to) their practice

Drugs as technologies of the self: Enhancement and transformation in LGBTQ cultures

The consumption of drugs has long been a mainstay of urban queer cultures and it is well-recognised that complex connections exist between sexual minoritisation and desires to chemically alter bodily experience. Yet despite evidence that rates of consumption are higher among LGBTQ populations, research exploring the gendered and sexual dynamics of these forms of consumption is limited and tends to frame such consumption as a response to stigma, marginalisation and discrimination. Against this dominant explanatory frame, this article explores the diverse experiences of LGBTQ consumers, and in so doing highlights both the pleasures and benefits of consumption, as well as potential risks and harms. Contributing to the growing body of ontopolitically oriented research that treats the materiality of drugs as emergent and contingent, we trace the ontologies of drugs, sexuality and gender that LGBTQ subjects generate through specific practices of consumption. Our analysis draws on qualitative interviews with 42 self-identified LGBTQ people from an Australian study designed to explore how sexual and gender-diverse minorities pursue particular drug effects to enhance or transform their experience of gender and/or sexuality. Our participants’ accounts illuminate how drug consumption materialises in relation to sex, desire and play where it enhances pleasure, facilitates transgression and increases endurance. In the context of gender variance, our findings suggest that drug use can transform gendered experience and enable the expression of non-normative gender identities, in the process challenging gender binarism. By considering the productive role of drugs in enacting queer identities, this article treats drugs as ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1988) and explores how drug consumption, sex and gender shape each other across a range of settings. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our findings for research and service provision, and suggest ways of engaging LGBTQ consumers in terms that address their diverse priorities and experiences

The Democratic Biopolitics of PrEP

PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a relatively new drug-based HIV prevention technique and an important means to lower the HIV risk of gay men who are especially vulnerable to HIV. From the perspective of biopolitics, PrEP inscribes itself in a larger trend of medicalization and the rise of pharmapower. This article reconstructs and evaluates contemporary literature on biopolitical theory as it applies to PrEP, by bringing it in a dialogue with a mapping of the political debate on PrEP. As PrEP changes sexual norms and subjectification, for example condom use and its meaning for gay subjectivity, it is highly contested. The article shows that the debate on PrEP can be best described with the concepts ‘sexual-somatic ethics’ and ‘democratic biopolitics’, which I develop based on the biopolitical approach of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow. In contrast, interpretations of PrEP which are following governmentality studies or Italian Theory amount to either farfetched or trivial positions on PrEP, when seen in light of the political debate. Furthermore, the article is a contribution to the scholarship on gay subjectivity, highlighting how homophobia and homonormativity haunts gay sex even in liberal environments, and how PrEP can serve as an entry point for the destigmatization of gay sexuality and transformation of gay subjectivity. ‘Biopolitical democratization’ entails making explicit how medical technology and health care relates to sexual subjectification and ethics, to strengthen the voice of (potential) PrEP users in health politics, and to renegotiate the profit and power of Big Pharma

Women, weather, and woes: The triangular dynamics of female-headed households, economic vulnerability, and climate variability in South Africa

Existing gender inequality is believed to be heightened as a result of weather events and climate-related disasters that are likely to become more common in the future. We show that an already marginalized group—female-headed households in South Africa—is differentially affected by relatively modest levels of variation in rainfall, which households experience on a year-to-year basis. Data from three waves of the National Income Dynamics Survey in South Africa allow us to follow incomes of 4,162 households from 2006 to 2012. By observing how household income is affected by variation in rainfall relative to what is normally experienced during the rainy season in each district, our study employs a series of naturally occurring experiments that allow us to identify causal effects. We find that households where a single head can be identified based on residency or work status are more vulnerable to climate variability than households headed by two adults. Single male-headed households are more vulnerable because of lower initial earnings and, to a lesser extent, other household characteristics that contribute to economic disadvantages. However, this can only explain some of the differential vulnerability of female-headed households. This suggests that there are traits specific to female-headed households, such as limited access to protective social networks or other coping strategies, which makes this an important dimension of marginalization to consider for further research and policy in South Africa and other national contexts. Households headed by widows, never-married women, and women with a non-resident spouse (e.g., “left-behind” migrant households) are particularly vulnerable. We find vulnerable households only in districts where rainfall has a large effect on agricultural yields, and female-headed households remain vulnerable when accounting for dynamic impacts of rainfall on income

Drugs and Domesticity: Fencing the Nation

Indirect techniques for controlling individuals are advanced, promoted in terms of a moral vocabulary of ‘self-care’. One of the challenges for a national culture disaggregating in this way is how to contain, channel, even profit from the fears, resentment and anxiety that accompanies the loss of various prior forms of security. Here I explore, through analysis of a number of texts, the ways in which the representation of drugs is rallied to this purpose—inciting, concentrating and managing the fear surrounding changes to the economic, political, racial and sexual landscape of our time, while refiguring expectations, demarcations and investments in the public and private domains, and how these spheres of action are made to appear

Sustaining safe practice: twenty years on

This paper examines the ways in which populations at risk of HIV in the developed world have enculturated the knowledges and technologies of both the medical and the social sciences. By revisiting a number of review papers and by reviewing findings from a range of studies, we argue that gay men have appropriated information that has enabled them to sustain safe practices while they have eschewed information that has made maintenance difficult. The paper describes a range of risk reduction strategies and compares the responses of populations at risk of HIV in the years before the advent of highly active antiviral therapy (HAART) with their responses after the introduction of HAART in 1996. We concentrate our argument on the changing responses to HIV risk of gay men, although occasionally illustrate our argument with reference to the responses of injecting drug users. The responses of gay men to risk post-HAART--particularly those who reside in Australia--speak to the adoption of a range of considered strategies, not altogether safe, to reduce harm. We argue that such strategies need to be understood and addressed within a 'new' social public health, that is, a public health that takes what social analysis has to say seriously. The paper examines the differences between the traditional, the 'modern' epidemiological/clinical and the 'new' social or socio-cultural public healths and describes the tensions between the medical and the social science disciplines in their efforts to inform public health. Key concepts provided by social science such as agency (including individual and collective agency), alongside its methodological reflexivity are key to effective public health. The risk avoidance strategies adopted by gay men suggest a way forward by turning our attention to the ways in which medicine is taken in(to) their practice.HIV HAART Risk Gay men Prevention