Men’s sexual desire for other men has created a plethora of real and virtual spaces for sex (Holmes & Warner, 2005). Indeed, outside the privacy of the home, consensual sexual encounters between men might take place in parks, alleys, restrooms, rest stops, adult theaters, video arcades, bookstores, bars, and gay bathhouses (Bérubé, 1996; Dean, 2009; Lindell, 1996; Shernoff, 2006). In recent years, Internet access has facilitated casual and anonymous sexual encounters, at the same time increasing the number of potential partners (Bull & McFarlane, 2000) given the design and widespread use of many apps on mobile phones, tablets, and laptops (Squirt, Grindr, Scruff, Hornet, etc.), as well as the proliferation of cruising websites. These new virtual environments designed to facilitate sexual encounters constitute an unprecedented key element not only for risk management regarding sexually transmitted infections (STIs) but also for understanding sexual behaviors. Apps and websites are now very common ways, if not the most common ones, to meet sexual partners. Some cater to very specific tastes and needs, such as the one that is at the core of our analysis below.
While unsafe sex has been reported since the beginning of the HIV epidemic, the underlying assumption has been that most gay and bisexual men do not seek to intentionally have unprotected anal sex. However, results of a qualitative Canadian investigation (Gastaldo, Holmes, Lombardo, & O’Byrne, 2009; Holmes, O’Byrne, & Gastaldo, 2006; Holmes & O’Byrne, 2006; Holmes & Warner, 2005) demonstrate that intentional unprotected anal sex among HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay and bisexual men occurs frequently in public spaces such as bars, bathhouses, sex clubs, often following Internet chat. Commonly defined as bareback sex, voluntary (unprotected or unsafe) anal intercourse (VUAI) rose in popularity at the end of the 1990s (Dean, 2009). Barebacking derives from the practice of bareback horse riding, or riding a horse without a saddle (Scarce, 1999). It differs from relapse, which refers to an omission on the part of partners to use condoms. Bareback sex thus constitutes a sexual practice in which condom use is explicitly and consciously excluded from anal intercourse. According to some non-scientific journal articles, gay and bisexual men practice VUAI for various reasons: for an increase in sexual pleasure, for a feeling of true connection and intimacy with one’s partner, for sexual arousal at the thought of transgressing recommendations from public health organizations and HIV prevention campaigns, for symbolic bonding through the exchange of semen between partners, and finally, as a result of new treatments in the battle against HIV/AIDS (Holmes & Warner, 2005; Holmes et al., 2006; Shernoff, 2006). Bareback sex is considered by many as an “extreme sexual practice” that defies public health discourse, and which constitutes a blatant indicator of tensions between public health imperatives and individual desires.
Before we move further, a word of caution is in order. According to Shernoff (2006), there are two forms of barebacking: unsafe and unprotected. Unsafe barebacking refers to an HIV-negative man having anal intercourse with a partner of unknown HIV status or a partner he knows to be HIV-positive, thus increasing the risk for the transmission of HIV. Unprotected anal sex is anal intercourse without a condom between two HIV-negative men. Although we can appreciate Shernoff’s clarification of terms, barebacking is almost solely used in the public realm (which includes gay communities) as voluntary unsafe anal sex with an anonymous partner (whose HIV status may be known or unknown). We concur with other researchers in the field who indicate that bareback sex obeys two principles: the intentional practice of anal sex without a condom and the potential (if not the desire) to be infected with HIV. The barebacking community, if such monolithic collective exists, is far from homogeneous. The “gift-givers” and the “bug-chasers” constitute a very specific subgroup. The gift-giving and the bug-chasing dyad is important to our critical discourse analysis (to follow). Gift-givers are HIV-positive men who offer to transmit (to “give”) HIV to those who desire it. Bug-chasers are men who are HIV-negative and desire to be infected by HIV. Between the two, a transaction is sought: give/receive the “gift” of HIV. It is very important to note that the website selected for our analysis does not promote the exchange of THE gift (HIV) and, as such, the transaction (HIV) between gift-givers and bug-chasers is not the focus of our analysis.
The purpose of this chapter is to conduct a critical discourse analysis of a specific barebacking website called Bareback Brotherhood (www.bbbh.com); we focus more precisely on the “welcome email” to subscribers. According to the website, the “Bareback Brotherhood stands as a beacon” and is a social group of men around the globe from all walks of life agreeing and understanding that sex between men without barriers is a natural and legitimate choice, if not a right. Raw (or unprotected) sex is therefore promoted. Our analysis draws on the seminal work of Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1986, 1987) to interpret the discourses at play in this website’s welcome email, as well as to better understand the practice of barebacking as it is constituted by this virtual community.
To be sure, public health practice needs to be informed by research that incorporates more of the discourses of barebackers themselves, which has bearing on the prioritization of intimate, “raw” sex with partners over rationalized practices of STI protection (Dean, 2009; Holmes & Warner, 2005; Holmes & O’Byrne, 2006).
The current critical analysis is informed by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1986, 1987), and in particular their theoretical reflections on assemblages, multiplicities, and nomadology. Our poststructuralist analysis is oriented toward political effects, as well as bodily and embodied (sexual) intensities – and away from an analysis that would privilege a search for meanings or essences. In this respect, many poststructuralist scholars insist that the body has no meaning in itself, no essence; in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the body exists in the form of a (political) surface able to connect with other bodies and with other objects where it may find/create a function (Gagnon & Holmes, 2016). Bodies can produce “desire and affective relations, regardless of the identity or form of the objects” (Moreno, 2009, p. 220) – animate or not – in and/or through which they come into contact. Defined through the assemblages they forge with others, bodies are said to be “socialized” or “social” because they are able to interact with their environment(s).
Most environments, such as the places in which we work or live, obey a strict representation of reality, which is permeated and regulated (if not coerced) by discourses on “truth” and political technologies in order to govern individual and collective bodies. Some environments are more flexible and provide opportunities to create, make connections, and allow multiplicities to flourish. Often, these environments subvert the order of things and as such can be called rhizomatic (until these environments are themselves co-opted and become arborescent in their structures). New environments or sites of social interactions (assemblages) are created among multiplicities often to escape the constraints of ordinary life. These assemblages between persons and objects should be understood not in terms of internal structures (or fixed meanings); instead, assemblages must be accounted for in terms of their endless possibilities and multiple, albeit transitory, connections. As Mansfield (2000) notes: “it is not in the excavation of stable structures that things are to be understood, but in the immersion in the endless play on and of surfaces” (p. 140). Of course, in the context of our analysis, these surfaces are barebacking bodies themselves.
These bodies enjoy forming assemblages with others with the help, perhaps, of the mouth and the skin, but more specifically, the barebacking assemblage has more to do with the anus, the penis, and semen in order to allow intensities to flow and to produce new potential becomings and, therefore, new subjectivities.
To be sure, the Bareback Brotherhood (BBBH) website constitutes a marginal space of experimentation outside the normative grid proposed and regulated by public health discourses. But from the moment that a series of connections are rigidly combined and function identically for everyone (as we see potentially operating within the BBBH website), these connections become parts of a stratified assemblage: a machine.
The machine has neither identity nor objective; “it is defined by the specificities of its components” (Nixon, 2012, p. 109). “Within the machine, the fluid and flexible compositions of assemblages are replaced by static connections between elements that make up assemblages” (Gagnon & Holmes, 2016, p. 254). It is not that machinic assemblages are negative in and of themselves, but they become fixed and unable to afford the same level of creativity (for example, dependency on a specific drug regimen for the human machine to survive). In other words, assemblages become machines when experimentation and flux are replaced by dependent connections and fixation: the “machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization [the act of ‘coming undone’], and draw variations and mutations of it” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 367; also see Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 322; Gagnon & Holmes, 2016). As stated above, “according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), assemblages must avoid (over)coding and remain forever in flux or else run the risk of transforming themselves into an apparatus of capture” (Gagnon & Holmes, 2016, p. 254).
Because we were ultimately interested in how the website’s welcome email discursively constructs barebacking identities, communities, and practices, we decided upon critical discourse analysis (CDA). There are many different ways to perform discourse analysis, let alone CDA (see e.g., Jorgensen & Philips, 2002), and instead of being formally rooted or stratified in any one tradition, our approach drew on different sources and inspirations to produce our own methodological assemblage. We maintained three foci within our analyses of barebacking discourses: the construction of objects and subjects, ideological impacts, and textual features.
There is much debate around what discourses are (see e.g., Parker, 1990a, 1990b; Potter et al., 1990); however, at a most general level, they may be understood as systems of statements that construct both objects and subjects (Parker, 1990a, 1990b). Discourses engage in what philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1986) described as a “structuring act,” whereby they assemble an image of the world figured by specific relations, processes, and meanings (p. 10, pp. 76–88). Seminal works abound on the different subjectivities born from various discourses on gender and sexuality (Foucault, 1978, 1985, 1986; Salih & Butler, 2004; Taylor & Vintges, 2004). Discourses address people, instigate a response, and work to determine who can respond and how (Parker, 1990a); discourse analysis, then, must be “oriented to action,” treating language as a production of objects/subjects, rather than an “abstract, essentially referential system” (Potter et al., 1990, p. 209).
With regard to our second focus, discourses often operate within a climate of hegemonic power relations, where certain constructions are accepted more widely than others, leading to the marginalization of alternative subjectivities (Edley, 2011; Fairclough, 2003). We understood the welcome email of the Bareback Brotherhood website as an event within an ongoing competition for legitimacy between different barebacking discourses. In order to locate the email’s ideological inclinations, we looked to the “process of normalization/naturalization” going on within it, as well as “whose interests are best served” by its depictions of reality (Edley, 2011, p. 190). This critical approach situates discourse analysis within “a variety of action research, in which the internal system of any discourse and its relation to others is challenged” (Parker, 1990a, p. 201; also see Van Dijk, 1993).
Our third mode of attention builds upon the recognition that discourses are enacted through texts and must be analyzed in their textual features (Fairclough, 1992; Potter et al., 1990). We drew upon two interrelated forms of textual analysis as suggested by Fairclough (1992). The first includes the “intertextual” relations of discourses to the “orders of discourse” (Fairclough, 1992); the structuring act of discourse involves the assemblage of language into various forms, enlisting different genres, styles, tropes, metaphors, and other formal aspects in the service of the discourse (Fairclough, 2003; Ricoeur, 1986; Todorov, 1981). Discourses do not simply create a world ex nihilo; they utilize the strategies of other discourses and conventions to build linkages, associations, and suggestions within a specific significatory or sociosemiotic context (Fairclough, 2003; Parker, 1990a). Talk of barebacking, for instance, often appropriates and addresses other discourses around and beyond barebacking, employing similar rhetorical strategies and parallel ideologies. Part of the work of CDA is to extricate these embedded intertextual references and their political effects. A second form of textual analysis studies the linguistic structuring of discourse, such as the design and positioning of sentences, the proximity or collocation of terms, grammar usage, etc. (Fairclough, 1992, 2003). Potter et al. (1990) argue that discourses, which they call “interpretative repertoires,” can be seen “using distinct grammatical constructions and styles” (p. 212), and discussion of these features can reveal the “array of interpretative procedures” used within a given context (p. 213). It is through this lens that we understand the form and the content of discourses to be inseparable; indeed, we understand textual analysis and the analysis of discourses to be complementary (Fairclough, 1992; Potter et al., 1990).
Analysis of the welcome email rendered five major discursive constructions and effects, presented sequentially as they unfold within the text: 1) positioning barebackers as nomads in search of a smooth space, 2) displaying de-territorialized multiplicity and freedom within a territorialized community, 3) exchanging and assembling words/fluids/politics, 4) stratifying what “brotherhood” means, and 5) constructing the brotherhood’s origin and direction. Each of these discourses employs different genres and strategies to construct barebacking in particular ways; however, they all converge upon larger debates about sexual freedoms and resistance to public health instructions, which are identified within the email as fundamental issues of barebacking identity and politics. The discourses discussed below often surreptitiously address and challenge public health discourses, attempting to take control of conversations about barebacking and to resignify its public image. In the welcome email, the BBBH community is constructed against stratified assemblages of sexual encounters (as defined by public health as safe sex practices), and yet it ultimately enters its own machinic state of assembling barebackers.
The welcome email deploys a series of tropes or metaphoric images in and through which new members may interpret themselves and their sexual activities and desires. It begins this process by first constructing a nomadic community around the practice of barebacking. The beginning of the email, received by newly registered members, is structured as a greeting or welcoming letter to place members within this community:
We are so glad to have you on board, Brother!
Several strategies are used to make a community out of the sexual practices of barebacking. The sentence starts with an affirmation of community (“We”), imbuing this community with a positive valence (“so glad to have you”), before positioning it within a shared platform, a ship or vessel possibly in movement, and to which members are “on board.” The image is then rooted within the capitalized and exclamatory designation, “Brother.” This affirmation assembles BBBH members as a community under the sign of brotherhood, which connotes not just a family relation, but a political or even a religious order with its own conventions and privileges.
The sentence that follows, on a separate line, offers nuanced elements to this discourse of community. The genre shifts from a greeting to a position statement on the group’s practices:
The Bareback Brotherhood is a social website meant to provide you with an opportunity to get to know others who believe as you do – raw sex is just a natural expression of love, lust and attraction.
Again, the communal is highlighted by the collocation of “social” and “website.” The text suggests that, above all, the group and its online activities are interactive and recreational – not, say, explicitly informational, political, etc. The website’s stated becoming is to “provide” connections, a meeting environment for people of allegedly like minds.
However, the text seems to go much further than its claims that barebacking entails a community and that BBBH offers a “smooth” space for sexual/desiring assemblages. Public health discourses often define barebacking as “dangerous” and “deviant” sexual behavior. Talk of being “on board” with others implicates this broader social marginalization of barebacking but mobilizes a social history favorably to work for the BBBH community. The text accomplishes a revaluation of barebacking by several implicit polarizations. First of all, by defining the community as “others who believe as you do,” the controversy surrounding barebacking is constructed as one mainly of sexual beliefs or mores, and not of sexual practices, thereby skirting mention of the detrimental health sequelae of engaging in unsafe sex.
Secondly, these beliefs are normalized as “natural expressions,” and links are implied between the natural and the good/safe/healthy. As seen in other resistances toward public health inductions – see e.g., “anti-vaxxers” against vaccinations – perspectives seen as against the natural are labelled as unwarranted interventions of a punitive, stratified social structure. That barebacking is stated as “just a natural expression” betrays the text’s own ideological aspirations, but this simplification of barebacking is utilized to disarm its negative social codifications. Collocation of the words “raw” and “sex” (instead of the most commonly linked “unsafe” and “sex”) is particularly effective at seizing control of barebacking discourses and reconfiguring sex practices. Talk of “raw” sex elicits imagery of more carnal, masculine, and pleasurable intercourse, while its alternative appears more repressive, unnatural, feminized, and less pleasurable. “Raw” can also mean fresh and untainted, and this stands in opposition to sex with a condom, which is allegedly mediated, intervened upon, and corrupted in the process (cf. emerging discourses of “natural” foods against GMO foods). A dichotomy is created between ungratifying (stratified) sex in compliance with restrictive social norms, on the one hand, and uninhibited (smooth) sexual pleasure made nature’s way, on the other.
A third strategy used within this text refers back to the organizing metaphor of being “on board.” Given the context of marginalization, the email could be read as using a common trope of diaspora narratives, namely, taking to the sea, toward a smooth space free from judgment and persecution. It is implied that barebackers are a nomadic community escaping social stratification toward smooth spaces where connections are more fluid and unregulated; the email later positions BBBH as a “destination” for such assemblages.
We can thus see that barebacking is politicized in a particular way within this discourse, appearing as an innocuous belief in “natural sex” being unjustly discriminated against by stratifying structures. The above “beliefs” are projected onto the recipient of the email (“believe as you do”), who is interpellated into a community and a discourse that promises liberation. With the dichotomy set between libertarian and authoritarian treatments of pleasure, the text compels a sympathetic reader to appropriate its discourse of unregulated sex.
While the beginning of the email establishes a social unity of identities and meanings, the next paragraphs attempt to show that there is much diversity, tolerance, and individuality within the barebacking community. The text shifts genres to a review of the website’s “services” that enable this pluralism:
While here, I hope you’ll explore the many GROUPS available to you. Dozens are available … some geographically based all over the world, some based on fetishes and some simply about sexual activities. Not finding what you’re into? Form your own GROUP!
Your PROFILE provides many powerful features including a lot of information about you. You can also upload photos of any type into your ALBUM. We don’t restrict them. Rated G to XXX, upload away and share!
Connect with other barebackers by becoming FRIENDS with them. Interact via GROUPS and send PRIVATE MESSAGES!”
Building upon the above image of unjustly suppressed sexual beliefs, these paragraphs cloak the BBBH’s ideology with a language of permissiveness. All kinds of desires and images are advertised as within the realm of possibilities. More generally, words given in all caps point to either a diversity of relations (“GROUPS,” “FRIENDS,” and “PRIVATE MESSAGES”) or to unhindered self-expression (the unregulated “PROFILE” and “ALBUM” displaying photos “Rated G to XXX”). Many of the above sentences are structured as commands despite being affirmations of members’ freedoms: “Form your own group,” “upload away and share,” “Connect with other barebackers,” and “interact via GROUPS.” With these topicalized verbs, the text seems to highlight the many ways members can “act” within the BBBH. Under this organization of discourse, the BBBH takes the guise of a benevolent assemblage of deterritorialized barebackers, legitimized by implicit appeals to the liberal principles of “freedom” and “equality.”
The first paragraph above opens with a more personal tone by shifting from the plural personal pronoun “we” in the initial greeting to a singular personal pronoun (“I hope”). The text then offers up images of possibility and freedom, where members “explore” all that is “available.” The all-capped “GROUPS” recovers the sense of community, but now as a multiplicity of communities from which members may choose and to which they may connect. The next sentence reinforces this claim to multiplicity, stating, “Dozens are available,” before listing “evidence” of the BBBH’s diversity. The individuality and agency of the member is made more explicit in the next two sentences, as members are told they can make their own community and form new assemblages if their explorations of pre-existing GROUPS turn up unsatisfying results.
The second paragraph goes further to suggest members may “personalize” and, thus, freely operate the website’s features. Like the GROUPS, the PROFILE is constructed as an enabler of creative becoming, ultimately in the member’s control, visible in the collocation of “your” and “PROFILE.” This agency is further reinforced by the following statements, that “You can” upload “any type” of photograph on “your ALBUM.” The plural personal pronoun “We” is brought back in to display the BBBH as a laissez-faire organization where stratification (or at least the discourse surrounding it) is avoided; the claim that “We don’t restrict them” implies not only that the group’s interactions are “unregulated,” but that there are regulatory bodies out there that the BBBH is positioning itself against, and moreover that unregulated interactions are natural and desirable. This refers back to the earlier reference to censored sexual beliefs and the alleged community need to seek out more tolerant (smooth) – in this case, online – spaces.
The third paragraph pulls the discourse back to one of community. It establishes the main relational forms that member interaction can take, again by implicating the individual’s agency with active verbs: “connect,” “become,” “interact,” and “send.” Collectively, these three paragraphs construct the BBBH as a place of inclusion and freedom, drawing upon political discourses of liberalism and even human rights discourse in order to 1) legitimate the BBBH’s existence and more subtly to 2) challenge criticisms of barebacking as a proposed violation of individual freedom. This discourse seems to offer a counter-narrative to public health discourses, constructing the BBBH as akin to a civil rights organization.
The following paragraph introduces a third dominant discourse into the email, articulated by the metaphor of the exchange/gift (Mauss, 1967). While the first two discourses construct community and agency in relation to the BBBH, this third discourse emphasizes the “productivity” or contribution of members’ assemblages to the group’s online presence. The email mentions that members’ correspondence is recorded and quantified into a point system or virtual currency of “LOADS”:
You can earn BAREBACK LOADS by logging in and interacting. The more LOADS, the more you advance up the #BBBH ladder.
This discourse of exchange constructs a reward system for “assembling” online. There are many forms of exchange articulated within this discourse, but they converge around making the practice of barebacking more visible, more common, and somehow in accordance with the economic exchange of libertarian (unregulated) capitalism. First, the naming of this reward system reflects an entanglement of discourse and intercourse – the sensualization of (online) interactions and the textual accomplishment of orgasm. Dialogue simulates the exchanges of sex, ultimately leading to a “production” or “earning” in the form of a “BAREBACK LOAD.” A parallel is drawn between semen and LOADS as a gift or product resulting from an exchange; LOADS are “earned” by “interacting”; assemblages are encouraged. In this context, the gift seems to carry forward the voices of the exchange; it is constructed as a communicative residue left behind to continue “speaking” after the conversation has ended. The words “BAREBACK LOAD” are given in all caps, which suggests they are connected to the discourses of community and agency enacted in the above talk of GROUPS, PROFILE, and so on. These assemblages provide some clarification into how identity, freedom, and pleasure intersect within barebackers’ talk of their sexual practices.
In the language play between semen and LOADS, the exchange of words is made akin to the exchange of flesh and fluids. Members are encouraged to “engage in text” from “inside” the group’s virtual space, and the resulting LOADS emulate the semiological function of semen. This discourse attempts to effect an appropriation of the group’s online structures and relations into assembled material bodies during anal intercourse. Within this construction an assemblage is born, as the keyboard and computer screen become extensions of the sexual apparatus, the disembodied chat room a venue for group sex, and transmissions across the Internet network a bio-digital orgasm.
There is a second, more explicitly political exchange in addition to the above linguistic eroticism. The activity of dialogue and LOAD production contributes to the broader online public presence of barebacking; hence, the reference to the social networking hashtag (“#BBBH”). Toward these purposefully related ends, the text promotes a “promiscuous” discourse; the more members chat, the more they “cum,” the more they campaign for the BBBH. In effect, at least within the text of the email, politics is made erotic, and pleasure is made ideological. This emerging political function of the group is made more explicit slightly further down the email:
Show your support by buying a #BBBH WRISTBAND. Wear it while you’re out and subtly show you’re a raw advocate.
Here barebacking is most explicitly defined as a political struggle, more than a sexual health or public health problem. After being discursively promised a community and their own agency, new members are now recruited to rally for barebacking. This is where assemblages run the risk of becoming machinic and thus unproductive. The two sentences above – both commands – redefine membership in the BBBH as involving public action, not just sharing certain beliefs and talking amongst members. The assemblage between barebackers and the website is now less fluid. The free zone has now become a zone where actions from barebackers are requested in the social field. The capitalization of “WRISTBAND” denotes this turn in the email toward stratified assemblages. The term “raw” is reintroduced, this time collocated with “advocate” to charge it with political meaning; no longer a term for uninhibited, natural expression, “raw” is now signified as an activity around which participants must organize (banded, scripted) demonstrations. Between talk of LOADS and WRISTBANDS, the email constructs barebacking as an intersection of pleasure, production, and protest.
There are limitations to the use of machinic assemblages in the context of the text’s talk of inclusivity. For example, while the email flags inclusive practices, such as unregulated group formations and profile pictures, the LOADS system may actually produce exclusionary spaces due to its quantification of social relations. Members are stratified along a tiered system of relations, the BBBH “ladder,” based on the number of LOADS they have acquired. Members “earn” their place on the ladder by engaging in a third form of exchange along with words and LOADS: a capitalist exchange of labor (participating in online dialogue/sex/advocacy) for cultural capital.1 The repetition of “more” in the sentence, “The more LOADS, the more you advance up the #BBBH ladder” creates a symmetrical relation between members’ wealth of LOADS and their status within the BBBH community. Their relations to each other and their “commitment” to the ideology is thus made determinate according to their LOADS. What is advertised as a playful competition may serve as a virtual economy used to hierarchize subjectivities among members (e.g., who is and who is not an “active” barebacker). This critical subtext to the email raises suspicion about the rise of machinic assemblages within a supposedly smooth space dedicated first to connecting members.
Another limitation to the discourse of exchange is the glaring absence of any talk of the dangers of barebacking. By defining barebacking as a marginalized belief system in the midst of a political struggle, the email evades addressing the health risks involved in barebacking. In fact, the email seems to transform the subtext of risk into an explicit text of “costs”; for example, the email states in exclamation: “All this comes for FREE! There’s no cost.” The mention of costs comes right after introducing the LOADS system, and within this capitalist discourse, cost and risk may be read as interconnected concepts. The emphasis placed on the affordability of (free) membership raises questions about why such statements are needed among people allegedly motivated to join the BBBH to escape stratified sexual assemblages. There is of course no mention of social costs. It is possible that “cost” is used as a euphemism for risk. Applying an economic logic to members’ assessments of the group, this talk may serve to redirect attention and experiences away from the real “costs” of membership and toward its “benefits” and “earnings” in the LOADS system.
Nearing the last quarter of the email, the text repeats the structure of the welcome greeting, not only to tie the previous sections of the email together but also to produce a powerful new discourse on barebacking identity. This time, the greeting ends with a very symbolically charged addendum:
Again, welcome aboard! We’re glad to have you, Brother-in-Cum!
“Brother-in-Cum” may be read as a triple entendre connoting different assemblages within the email’s discourse: assemblages of intercourse, fraternity, and “principled” activity. In terms of the first, one way of reading the expression implicates bodily parts and fluids (anuses-penises-semen) participating in an orgiastic immersion in semen. In other words, BBBH members are connected through the semen they share with each other.
A second reading reveals a claim to shared practices and meanings, metaphorized as a social fraternity, a brotherhood proper. At the beginning of the email, a condition of joining the BBBH is laid out: consenting to a selective meaning of barebacking as “raw” and “natural” sexual intercourse. This singular meaning conceals other recognizable and less “innocuous” reasons for engaging in the practice mentioned in our introduction, such as the deliberate transgression of norms, the lack of concern for or misunderstanding of HIV, seeking thrills or danger, and bug-chasing. On the other hand, rarely is such an assemblage recognized or permitted within dominant discourses of barebacking. At the very least, the expression “Brother-in-Cum” is an attempt to unite marginalized voices under a resignified image of barebacking.
Thirdly, the expression draws from military imagery, suggesting a band of brothers or “brothers-in-arms” fighting for their “liberty.” This strategic signifier suggests an ethics and heroics to barebacking, as an embodied assertion of certain ethical principles – much as seen in other areas of the text, through freedom of belief and expression. This move continues the ongoing reversal of barebacking from a danger to public health to an individual right within the public interest.
The triple images of “Brother-in-Cum” are all unified social bodies: orgies, brotherhoods, and platoons. While the first seems to be a fluid activity spread across a smooth surface of bodies, the latter two appear to be more machinic assemblages, which threaten to overtake the fluidity of becoming associated with the first. So, the email comes back to and seems to reify a communal discourse of stratified membership, after a temporary interlude on the individuality and diverse exchanges inherent in membership.
In the final paragraphs of the email, the text seeks to situate the BBBH member within a particular beginning and future. This final discourse bridges the earlier diasporic narrative of marginalization with a prospective narrative of collective empowerment:
The Bareback Brotherhood is so new but we have experienced a lot of growth with more than 300 members in only a couple of weeks. I personally want to welcome you to the online beta site of what I hope will be a destination for you.
There is no money to be made here and it’s nothing more than a small grassroots effort that started [on] Twitter, but we hope that this group can grow to be a voice that barebacking is about freedom to enjoy intimacy the way we want.
Please know that we are currently working on the new site and trying out some new features but enjoy yourself and have a good time. Join us on Twitter and Facebook …
The first paragraph reaffirms barebacking as an oppressed activity and legitimizes the BBBH community with a narrative of “growth,” created by the use of adverbs and adjectives to modify appearance of the organization’s history and size: the group is “so new” but has acquired “more than 300 members in only a couple of weeks.” This statement suggests there is a “demand” for a barebacking community evidenced by its rapidly growing membership ready to connect with one another. In the next sentence, the relationality of the text shifts back from a communal “we” to a dyadic “I” and “you.” Within this rhetoric of more intimate subjectivities, the offering of a “welcome,” “hope,” and a “destination” continues the nautical trope from the greeting, implicating the nomadism of barebackers and offering a haven to them, a (chat)room of their own, a smooth space to experiment.
The second paragraph employs another strategy to construct the BBBH as a safe and politically involved community. The first sentence uses two absolutes toward this end, the first (“no money”) to once again address risk by referring to “costs,” and the second (“nothing more”) to once again stratify the group’s dynamic to its stated aim of fighting for sexual freedoms. By appropriating a discourse on community empowerment (a “small grassroots” movement toward amplifying its “voice”), the text constructs barebackers as a stigmatized community built around particular beliefs (“barebacking is about freedom”). Notably, the “hope” is again situated within a “we.” Expanding on the “Brother-in-Cum” expression, the second clause associates dialogue (“voice”) with resistance (fighting for “freedom”) and pleasure (“enjoy intimacy the way we want”), reinforcing the tripartite assemblages of exchanging words, fluids, and politics.
The final paragraph presents the BBBH as an evolving and contemporary group, trying out “new” things and maintaining a social media presence. Pleasure and community are given the final words in the finishing lines of the email: “enjoy yourself and have a good time. Join us on Twitter and Facebook.” This call for an expansion of assemblages between barebackers through various less constraining environments is a message that clashes with the earlier expectations placed upon members to contribute to the BBBH cause.
The welcome email constructs barebacking in relation to other discourses, especially dominant discourses on barebacking from public health perspectives. The BBBH’s management of talk effectively conceals its critics, particularly from within public health, by transforming conversations about barebacking. The BBBH attempts to normalize a “delinquent” sexual practice and de-stratifies the practice of bareback sex. But in doing so, it proposes new ways of connecting men through the use of overt resistance strategies (wristband, etc.). Among its strategies of becoming, the email constructs barebackers as nomads, naturalizes and politicizes their sexual practices, eroticizes online discussion, and sanctifies the BBBH cause under the pretense of deterritorializing sexual assemblages. This rhetoric is productive in the sense of opening up potential communities and subjectivities for bodies seeking new pleasures.
However, there is a double-edged sword to the BBBH’s discourses about barebacking. The email presents BBBH as a form of utopia, what Paul Ricoeur (1986) has described as a practice of “social subversion” delivered to “reveal the undeclared overvalue and in that way to unmask the pretense proper to every system of legitimacy” (pp. 319–321); in this context, the utopia of the BBBH is defined against what is seen as the ideology of public health discourses on barebacking. In the email’s attempts to position barebackers as nomads and the BBBH as their haven, it stratifies barebackers’ subjectivities, creates virtual hierarchies with the LOADS system, and regiments conduct between members. Here, the utopia becomes its own ideological structure, no longer deterritorializing surfaces of pleasure but engaging in the “structuring act” of hardening or ossifying sociosexual relations. Although assemblages between barebackers might be fluid within a smooth space of becoming, assemblages between barebackers on the website appear more machinic.
Our critical discourse analysis of the BBBH is important for the practice of public health as it helps practitioners to better understand the activities of MSM who are part of a sexual subculture, keeping in mind that the MSM population is still the prime target of public health campaigns regarding sexually transmitted infections and HIV.
1 Cultural capital is defined here as “goods material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation” (Harker, Mahar, & Wilkes, 1990, p. 13).
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