ABSTRACT
By rejecting the Oedipal structures and body schemas that have sustained the development of the modern autonomous subject and its sanctioned forms of kinship, gay “pigs” experiment with alternative experiences of communion that they enact through exchanging bodily fluids with strangers. In this chapter I present and develop this idea by exploring the limitations of dominant conceptualisations of community and showing how forms of gay “pig” sexual sociability in the age of antiretrovirals can offer an alternative model for thinking experiences of kinship and belonging that no longer require that something is held in common amongst the members of a given community. Gay “pigs” are bought together less because of any pre-existing qualities or attributes they share with others but, instead, by the flows of bodily fluids that cut across their bodies and circulate between them. Their sexual practices symbolically call into question the paradigms of immunity that have sustained both the idealised autonomy of individual bodies and that of modern nation-states. Through that, they can help us think through what a polity could look like that is no longer dependent on the policing of borders between self and other, between the familiar and the foreign.
