Kane Race
Kane Race (BA (Hons.), LLB, PhD, FAHA) is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His work approaches drugs and the transformations that drugs are taken to induce as significant elements in the crafting of effective history. He has particular interest in drug practices that have emerged in connection with cultural and sociotechnical responses to HIV/AIDS, from the clinical repurposing of antiretroviral drugs to prevent and control infection to subcultural uses of stimulants to create and sustain certain forms of sexual sociability. He is the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (Duke UP, 2009); Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water (MIT Press, 2015, with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter); and The Gay Science: Intimate experiments with the problem of HIV (Routledge, 2018). With Melissa Hardie and Meaghan Morris he co-edited The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies (Indiana University Press, 2024).
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Books by Kane Race
Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.
Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically and historically detailed case studies, the book examines how new technologies and scientific artifacts – such as antiretroviral therapy, digital hookup apps and research methods – mediate sexual encounters and shape the worlds and self-practices of men who have sex with men.
Rather than debunking scientific practices or minimizing their significance, The Gay Science approaches these practices as ways in which we ‘learn to be affected’ by HIV. It explores what knowledge practices best engage us, move us and increase our powers and capacities for action. The book includes an historical analysis of drug use as a significant element in the formation of urban gay cultures; constructivist accounts of the emergence of barebacking and chemsex; a performative response to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and its uptake; and, a speculative analysis of ways of thinking and doing sexual community in the digital context.
Combining insights from queer theory, process philosophy and science and technology studies to develop an original approach to the analysis of sexuality, drug use, public health and digital practices, this book demonstrates the ontological consequences of different modes of attending to risk and pleasure. It is suitable for those interested in cultural studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, digital culture, public health and drug and alcohol studies.
Kane Race is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the convenor of the Queer Contingent of Unharm and the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (2009) and Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water (with Gay Hawkins and Emily Potter, 2015).
The book considers the assemblage and emergence of a mass market for water, from the invention of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle in 1973 to the development of “hydration science” that accompanied the rise of jogging in the United States. It looks at what bottles do in the world, tracing drinking and disposal practices in three Asian cities with unreliable access to safe water: Bangkok, Chennai, and Hanoi. And it considers the possibility of ethical drinking, examining campaigns to “say no” to the bottle and promote the consumption of tap water in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Papers by Kane Race
Introduction
Following the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the combination antiretroviral drug, Truvada (tenofovir disoproxil and emtricitabine), for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a number of commentators sought to call into question the value of PrEP on the basis of its ascribed association with sexual pleasure and uninhibited ‘hedonism’. ‘Let’s be honest: it’s a party drug’, Michael Weinstein, President of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles, (in)famously declared (Associated Press, 2014). This figuration of PrEP can be read against a backdrop where the historical associations between gay sex, pleasure, drugs, and death are simultaneously highlighted and (re)problematised (Bersani, 1987). If the association of PrEP with sexual pleasure (that is, as ‘a party drug’) was intended as a kind of deterrent device – or indeed deployed in order to produce inhibitions around PrEP’s use – in this article we propose to take Weinstein’s claim seriously and explore the possibility that PrEP’s framing as a party drug may in fact be analytically useful. Drawing on the accounts of participants taking PrEP as part of a broader study of LGBTQ drug use, we argue that the sexual and corporeal possibilities afforded by PrEP provide pragmatic insights about its use, meanings, and effects. If the effects of drugs are understood to emerge in the context of the networks in which they are embedded (Fraser and Moore, 2011), then situating PrEP in relation to ‘party’ drugs and sex partying might provide greater clarity on how this drug variously materialises in situated, embodied practices. We focus in particular on tracing the figurations of PrEP in participants’ accounts of sexualised drug use (or ‘chemsex’), and how it emerges through encounters of sex, bodies and drugs, generating new affective, bodily capacities to participate in chemsex without fear of HIV infection. In doing so, we identify PrEP as part of the assemblage of chemsex, and argue for a more capacious account of chemsex that disrupts the dualisms of licit/illicit drugs, therapeutic/recreational use, and normalcy/pathology. The account we elaborate resonates with the ‘affective turn’ in body studies insofar as it centres the intensities of embodied sensations and emotions – or ‘bodily affectivities’ (Blackman, 2021: 48) – produced through the encounters of bodies, drugs, sex and partying. In this respect, our analysis articulates a processual view of the body as a porous, permeable assemblage of human and more-than-human phenomena (Blackman, 2021: 27; Latour, 2004). Consistent with our concern to interrogate the binary distinctions drawn in relation to drugs, such a view also challenges the long-standing Cartesian dualisms of nature/culture, reason/emotion, mind/body and self/other, bridging their ontological separability and treating them as co-constituted phenomena which rely on each other for meaning. Doing so allows us to trace the entanglements of bodies-in-the-making, as they materialise in concert with ‘other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas’ (Alldred and Fox, 2017: 3), including antiretroviral drugs, pleasure, sexual practices and changing conceptions of HIV risk.
Background
HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis
The use of HIV antiretrovirals as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among gay, bisexual and queer-identifying men has dramatically increased since 2012. In Australia, this increase has been particularly noticeable since 2018 when it was approved for listing on the country’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, meaning it would henceforth be subsidised through the national health insurance programme. By 2019, PrEP had become the most common HIV prevention strategy (Holt et al., 2021). The experience of men in Australia therefore provides a lens through which to analyse cultural changes emerging from the widescale consumption of antiretrovirals. However, the use of antiretrovirals as PrEP has a complicated history in gay community discourse. As Race (2016) notes, PrEP initially emerged as a ‘reluctant object’ due to its association with condomless (and unrestrained) sex. PrEP asksed gay men ‘to preempt a possibility that [they] have become accustomed to accounting for after the event’ (Race, 2016: 23, emphasis added). The temporal reversal highlighted by Race draws attention to the paradoxical relationship between antiretrovirals and HIV risk. Antiretrovirals are often deemed to be associated with increases in ‘risky’ behaviour, including initiation or intensification of sexualised drug use (Zimmermann et al., 2021), however they also guard against the possible negative outcomes of these actions, that is, HIV transmission (Race et al., 2017), thereby simultaneously changing the nature of risk (Holt and Murphy, 2017).
From the late 1990s to the first decade of the 2000s, the ‘optimism’ attributed to antiretrovirals was often problematised through psychological framings such as ‘risk compensation’ (Holt and Murphy, 2017). However, there has since been a shift with more recent research highlighting the ‘unanticipated’ (Quinn et al., 2020) benefits of taking PrEP, including reduced anxiety about HIV and sex (Keen et al., 2020), and increased levels of sexual comfort, freedom and pleasure (Curley et al., 2022). Behavioural research has also acknowledged, albeit implicitly, the importance of antiretrovirals in relation to sexualised drug use, or ‘chemsex’, via discussions of different dosing strategies (‘event-based dosing’ or ‘on-demand’ strategies) (Closson et al., 2018; Roux et al., 2018).
In addition to the abovementioned work of Race (2016), a body of critical literature has explored the biopolitical (Atuk, 2020) and ontological (Holt, 2021; Rosengarten and Michael, 2010) dimensions of PrEP. Other research has analysed PrEP’s temporalities (Florêncio, 2020; Rosengarten and Murphy, 2020; Sandset et al., 2023), its spatial dimensions (Brown and Di Feliciantonio, 2021), and the historical conditions through which it emerged (Hakim, 2019). This article extends this critical literature by exploring the relationship between PrEP, sexualised drug use, and the bodily capacities that these phenomena generate in their encounters – that is, what they allow bodies to do and feel (Alldred and Fox, 2017; Blackman, 2021: 131).
Chemsex
The consumption of illicit drugs has long been a mainstay of urban gay cultures, as has the consumption of these drugs during sexual encounters. In recent decades, the latter has been increasingly referred to by the neologism ‘chemsex’, most commonly in the United Kingdom (Bourne et al., 2015). While other terms such as ‘PnP’ (Party ‘n’ Play) and ‘wired play’ are more common in the United States and Australia (Race, 2009), a significant body of literature has emerged on ‘chemsex’. We recognise that this literature is not without problems in that it has reified a particular object of sexualised drug use among gay, bisexual and queer men, associated with consuming the drugs crystal methamphetamine, mephedrone and gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB)/gamma-butyrolactone (GBL) (Edmundson et al., 2018). However, for our purposes, the term ‘chemsex’ offers potential as a term with widespread currency in popular culture, and one that is sufficiently capacious to include other drugs used to enhance or transform experiences of sex.
Although the relationship between illicit drugs (especially crystal methamphetamine) and sex has been an enduring area of research interest, the emergence and reification of the term, ‘chemsex’, has increased scholarly and popular cultural interest in this phenomenon (Møller and Hakim, 2021). Much of the behavioural research on chemsex has been concerned with negative outcomes, such as HIV transmission (Jennings et al., 2021), sexually transmissible infections (Achterbergh et al., 2020), sexual violence (Wilkerson et al., 2021), and poorer mental health and quality of life (Bohn et al., 2020; Ruiz-Robledillo et al., 2021). In recent times, epidemiologists and public health researchers have explored the association between PrEP and chemsex, identifying those men engaging in chemsex as more likely to use biomedical HIV prevention such as PrEP, thereby implicitly reinforcing the normative assumption that they are more responsible than their non-PrEP-using counterparts (Hammoud et al., 2020; Rollet et al., 2022) against expectations to the contrary. A critical literature on chemsex has also emerged, which explores its meanings and how it is constituted (Hickson, 2018; Santoro et al., 2020), its settings, relations and practices (Drysdale et al., 2020), and the concerns it indexes in relation to contemporary gay cultures (Kagan, 2018; Møller and Hakim, 2021; Race, 2018).
Chemical Practices
Despite the myriad ways in which antiretrovirals and illicit drugs intersect in the consumption practices of gay men, there have been surprisingly few attempts to consider these drugs together analytically. Maintenance of this boundary between licit and i...
Keywords: biopower; normalization; genealogy; bodies; identity; power/knowledge
Drawing on my experience of living with HIV for over two decades, this essay discusses the forms of anxiety and concern that emerged in 1996 in the context of the introduction of HIV combination antiretroviral therapy around the use of so-called 'drug cocktails'. It shows how these concerns reflect broader anxieties about increasing sexual activity between men at this time. This event happens to kickstart a corresponding problematisation of gay men's use of recreational drugs– another sort of 'drug cocktail' - on the same basis. I see the present moral panic over chemsex as the latest instalment of this discourse.
The piece demonstrates the analogous character of antiretroviral therapy and recreational substance use in gay men's practice, arguing that pleasure, self-medication, and experimentation with the conditions of life are concerns that cut across outdated distinctions between pharmaceutical drugs and illicit drugs. Meanwhile, the stigmatised and criminalised status of HIV-positive sex, gay sexuality and illicit drug use produces paranoid subjects and effectively endangers the health and wellbeing of those affected. It must be countered. Paying attention to the collective experiments of drug users is likely to be much more generative.
I wrote this piece for a collection called Long Term, edited by Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, who invited me to write something about living with HIV.
practices, and thus have more chance of being taken up. It also enables a more dynamic and responsive approach to the practice of bodies and pleasures.