Archived seminar
04 February 2015: The New Sexual Ecology? Towards a new understanding of mediated intimacy (CISC Seminar Series)
Dr. Sharif Mowlabocus from Sussex University
At 13:00 in 6.345.
Abstract:
In 1997, Gabriel Rotello put forward a controversial thesis regarding the relationship between HIV/AIDS and gay male culture. Contrasting many of his contemporaries, Rotello suggested that it was not Government inaction, social stigma or homophobic reactions to HIV, but the post-Stonewall culture of gay liberation and sexual freedom that had allowed the virus to become an epidemic. The chief instigators for the epidemic were gay male sexual cultures - the same cultures most affected by AIDS. Rotello’s book, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the destiny of Gay Men was condemned by many commentators as homophobic, sex-negative, reactionary and assimilationist. Today his work continues to be problematic for scholars, researchers and activists alike.
Nearly 20 years on from the publication of Sexual Ecology, the terrain of the HIV epidemic reveals continuities and discontinuities in the narrative of the virus in the Global North. Gay men, bisexual men and men who have sex with men (MSM) continue to make up the largest percentage of the HIV population. Meanwhile the way in which the virus is conceptualised, represented and treated has changed radically. PrEP is challenging the condom code while bareback pornography is reifying high risk sexual practices and gay men have access to one another in ways unimagined in 1997.
This paper forms part of a larger project seeking to develop a new sexual ecology; one that identifies the role that digital and social media, pharmacology, recreational drugs, pornography and politics have played in (re)shaping gay men’s relationship with sexual intimacy and HIV. In my presentation for CISC, I investigate one of these issues – digital and social media – in detail. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with gay and bisexual men, I chart the role that applications such as Grindr and websites such as Bareback Realtime play within the lives of gay and bisexual men. In doing so, and building upon the health promotion framework of ‘partner concordance’, I suggest that ‘platform concordance’ plays a key role in understanding how contemporary sexual networks are mobilised and, in turn, how HIV moves through these networks.
While not seeking to reinvigorate the political arguments that surrounded Rotello’s original work, I argue that our understandings of gay male intimacy, risk behaviours and HIV transmission must be informed by an ecological approach that takes into account the mediated landscape in which such practices of risk, intimacy and transmission take place.
Dr Sharif Mowlabocus is a senior lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Sussex. His research is situated at the intersection of digital media and gay male culture. His monograph, Gaydar Culture was published in 2010 and has published extensively on the themes of pornography, social media, HIV, digital health and sexual representation. He is on the editorial board for Porn Studies and the Journal of Language and Sexuality. He regularly collaborates with the Terrence Higgins Trust and was a researcher on the Count Me In Too project.
This event is open to the general public.