ABSTRACT
This chapter situates barebacking – both the practice and the desire – in terms of the scientific and technical infrastructures that produce and attend to it. It suggests the ways in which normative constraints on the representation of gay sex and HIV might be considered implicated in the proliferation of barebacking. In Australia, for example, education has been conducted on how to ensure safe unprotected sex between HIV-negative gay men in regular relationships since 1994 in a move that may arguably have undermined some of the appeal of so-called 'barebacking'. Barry Adam's analysis deals only with HIV-positive barebackers, who might be expected to bear a different relation to the erotics of risk than those at risk of HIV infection. He situates barebacking as a personal policy found among some HIV-positive men within urban gay communities embedded in a larger context of encountering men who are HIV-positive or 'in the know'.
