ABSTRACT
Trauma narratives are pervasive in relation to chemsex. They have been transformed into a tragedy by writers and filmmakers. These tragedies then circulate widely and teach us that even banal sexual disappointments can become experienced as traumatic and then represented as a tragedy – forming a tragedy-trauma disciplinary loop. A detailed case study of one of the participants, Barry, demonstrates how this loop can become retroactively installed so as to monologically shape understandings of chemsex. This is then contrasted with the work of novelist Guillaume Dustan and theorist Paul Preciado, who offer approaches to trauma that resist the sclerosis of sex, drugs, and sexuality within the tragedy-trauma loop. Through a close reading of their work, it is argued that chemsex can unbind the self from such restrictive narratives such that an unbounded porosity can emerge which allows new forms of subjectivity, sociality, and connection.
