Raw

PrEP: Pedagogy, and the Politics of Barebacking

Ricky Varghese

• Publisher: U of R Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780889776838
• eBook ISBN:
  9780889776852
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Marking the tenth anniversary of Tim Dean's Unlimited Intimacy, Raw returns to the question of sex without condoms, or barebacking, a timely topic in the age of PrEP, a drug that virtually eliminates the transmission of HIV.  "Essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of sex, sexuality and sexual representation in the 21st century." —John Mercer, author of Gay Pornography "Finally, queer theory returns to a topic it has had surprisingly little to say about: sex! Underpinning these essays is a thrilling wager: that desire demands discourse but resists rationalization." —Damon R. Young, author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies "A major contribution to research. It opens up the discourse on barebacking to a varity of perspectives and theoretical arguments, and makes clear that the topic remains relevant." —John Paul Ricco, author of The Decision Between Us "Raw provides an account of the state of queer-theoretical scholarship on bareback today, and makes a pluralising and distinctive contribution to that body of work, significantly broadening this field of scholarship." —Oliver Davis, editor of Bareback Sex and Queer Theory across Three National Contexts (France, UK, US) Contributors: Jonathan A. Allan (Brandon University), Tim Dean (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Elliot Evans (University of Birmingham), Christien Garcia (University of Cambridge), Octavio R. Gonzales (Wellesley College), Adam J. Greteman (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Frank G. Karioris (University of Pittsburgh & American University of Central Asia), Gareth Longstaff (Newcastle University), Paul Morris (San Francisco), Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku), Diego Semerene (Oxford Brookes University), Evangelos Tziallas (Concordia University), Ricky Varghese (Toronto), Rinaldo Walcott (University of Toronto) 

Chapter 1

Is the Foreskin a Grave?

Jonathan A. Allan

Every so often, we receive a particularly valuable comment from the peer review of an article; and sometimes—though, sadly, this is even less frequent—that comment takes us down a path that we had not imagined and, indeed, that ultimately causes us a kind of “was it worth it” anxiety. This chapter, in many ways, was provoked by an all-too-brief comment asking that I merely add a footnote to the article contending with how “anti-circumcision” activists often share much in common with “men’s rights activists” or how these discourses slip into one another. (Little did I know that this would be a common question when researching my book Uncut.) Easy enough, I thought. However, in searching for the “perfect” or the “ideal” quotation, I quickly came across a number of phrases about the foreskin that caught my attention. I jotted these down, set them aside, and kept adding to this list of phrases. And yet I continued to think about these statements. This chapter, then, is an attempt to make sense of the plethora of prose surrounding the foreskin, and subsequently to think through the role played by the foreskin in the discourses on barebacking, especially given how often the foreskin is imagined as diseased or risky while circumcision is imagined as a prophylactic measure.

On March 28, 2007, the United Nations “endorsed male circumcision as a way to prevent hiv infections in heterosexual men”; at the same time, the World Health Organization and unaids “said increasing male circumcision could prevent 5.7 million sub-Saharan African men from contracting hiv over the next two decades, and save 3 million lives.”8 Male circumcision—“the partial or total removal of the foreskin, or prepuce, of the penis”9—has been determined by these global organizations to be medically relevant and beneficent, and has been framed in a variety of places as a kind of “natural condom,” though surely not infallible.10 Nevertheless, “these [circumcision] proposals have attracted high levels of international support, including philanthropic endorsement and funding, notably from the Bill and Melinda Gates and Clinton Foundations.”11 Brian J. Morris, a professor of molecular medical sciences at the University of Sydney and the author of In Favour of Circumcision, arguably one of the most vociferous voices in favour of circumcision, goes so far as to argue that

although condoms reduce risk by 80–90% when always used, they are not infallible, nor used universally, and do not protect during foreplay when the inner prepuce may come into contact with infected fluids. Circumcision in contrast is once only, so does not need to be applied each time sex is contemplated, is permanent, and when coupled with condom use should virtually guarantee complete protection from infection by hiv.12

For Morris, a condom and circumcision would seemingly provide Fort Knox–like security for the penis. Circumcision becomes, to Morris’s mind, a “biomedical imperative.”13 The phrase “biomedical imperative” caught my attention as representative of the kind of language used to describe the removal of the foreskin.

Instead of focusing on circumcision itself, this chapter will focus its attention on what is being removed: the foreskin. In particular, I set out to think about how the foreskin is represented or not. Consider, for instance, the following examples. In an article in Men’s Health, readers learn that the “advantage of the foreskin is not clear,” which immediately sets in motion a kind of cost-benefit analysis. Readers will subsequently learn that “some scientists speculate that [foreskin] protected the prehistoric penis as it swung, naked, through thick forests and over tall grasses; and unless you take your penis on that sort of excursion, they argue, you don’t need foreskin.”14 In this specific scene, taken from the popular press, the foreskin is framed as primitive, a historical remnant from a time gone by, a time from which we have evolved.

In another telling example, Marie Fox and Michael Thomson note that the foreskin has been called a “piece of prehistoric human culture that now only exists as a reservoir of infection,”15 a claim echoed by Gerald N. Weiss, who called the foreskin a “cesspool.”16 In these cases, the foreskin is intimately tied to infection and disease. Melvin Anchell has suggested that “the foreskin is an anatomical remnant from a previous stage of evolution when it served a purpose. Today it is useless and may cause physical harm.”17 One cannot help but note the proximity between primitivism and infection or illness to which these descriptions of the foreskin allude.

Still another voice adds that the “foreskin turns out to be a sponge for the virus [hiv].”18 In Cassell’s Queer Companion, under the entry for “cut,” we read this:

Men seem prepared to go to war in defence of their foreskin, or lack of. Cut men smugly announce that their way is healthy, since reports suggest that having a foreskin can leave one more open to certain forms of cancer and that cuts to foreskin can lead to greater vulnerability to hiv transmission.19

Similarly, Robert C. Bollinger specifically notes that foreskins are “magnets for hiv.”20 If one thing is certain, it would seem that the foreskin is, at least in these writings, tied to illness, infection, viral politics, and disease and is, of course, oriented toward the chronic and toward death. Foreskins seem naturally inclined to absorb the virus in all of these descriptions. Circumcision is thus construed as “a lifesaving std stopper (for men and...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bio-political Limits
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Bodily Limits
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Porno-graphic Limits
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Psycho-analytic and Peda-gogical Limits
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Afterword
• About the Contributors