Tim Dean (1) (1964–)

In Unlimited Sexuality (2009), Tim Dean analyzes barebacking culture from a non-judgmental, non-advocacy angle in order to understand what motivates barebacking and ultimately to argue against identification politics and for a culture of contact instead of networking.

Dean begins by rejecting simplistic explanation that barebackers or internally homophobic because this explanation is victim-blaming, and he rejects the argument that it is unethical because the culture has not been thoroughly show more explored (3). Barebacking, as Dean explains it, is both an activity that needs to be understood and an identity that some take on in order to "consider themselves outlaws" in an antihormonormative sense (9).

Dean charges that there is a problem with identification politics, "the politics grounded in recognition, namely, the politics of the ideal image" (21) in part because we are always nagged by failing to live up to the ideal (23). He proposes instead an "impersonal ethics in which one cares about others even when one cannot see anything of oneself in them." The term impersonal is used because one views "the other as more than another person," but rather as alterity (25).

Chapter One explores how barebacking subculture eroticizes HIV with the effects of establishing a new type of kinship, and perhaps even more, biosociality, relating with others through biotechnological understandings (94-95). Chapter Two explores barebacking porn, arguing that it is not motivating (solely) by financial reasons, as many would argue. He argues that porn's enticement lies in its ability to make the — a loss of control — visible (106) and that porn is motivated to by an "incitement to see" (110), "the principle of maximum visibility," to the point that it attempts to "see" the interiority, the most private, part of the body (111).

Chapter Three takes a depathologizing approach to fetishism, arguing that virtually everything can be erotic (149). Rather than see racial fetishism in film as dehumanizing, Dean sees it as impersonalizing (160). This means that rather than stereotyping ("taking the part for the whole"), "fetishism works with parts that, strictly speaking, do not form part of a larger whole" (165).

Chapter Four argues for an ethics of contact rather than networking, drawing on the work of Jane Jacobs and Samuel Delaney. He argues that we all have something to learn from cruising because of its "remarkably hospitable disposition toward strangers," "a distinctive ethic of openness to alterity" (176). He argues that we need public contact with strangers, which ensures safety (182) and we need public spaces where strangers can interact (184). He argues against networking, which does not cross class boundaries "and thus is more private" (187). He also critiques online hookup sites for making sexual experiences private and having everything controlled in advance (196). He argues for an ethic of contact that finds pleasure in meeting the other, not in an instrumental way (207), but in an impersonal way: "in risking the self by opening it to alterity," in being vulnerable to the other (210). show less

In Beyond Sexuality (2002), Tim Dean "attempts to develop the category of the real in light of queer theory" (19) in order to to question the "intransigent, systemic assumption that sex confers the principal guarantee of subjective truth" and detach sex and desire from personhood (21).

According to Dean's reading of Lacan, desire is insatiable, distinct from biology (47). He theorizes the real as what is at the limits of the symbolic order (50), as something that "can be inferred from trauma" show more (51), and helping to "reveal how the outside—an alien alterity—inhabits the subject's most intimate inwardness" (53). Thus, the term "extimacy," and Dean's understanding that "The kind of protection that privacy entails has to do with personal intimacy than with one's relations to social institutions . . . since, from a psychoanalytic point of view, interpersonal intimacy is predicated on impersonal, public relations, rather than the reverse" (54).

Chapter Four explores why safe sex education in regards to AIDS is often a failure, arguing that we should view AIDS through the lens of psychoanalysis instead of individual risk (136). This affords us: 1) a move away from binary blaming (blaming those who have unsafe sex for harming the gay community (141); 2) understanding that because of "positive images" of people with AIDS, seropositive gays have developed "a certain glamour" (146); 3) understanding that "AIDS has become a new cultural identity" (147); 4) "the elimination of uncertainty—and hence anxiety—that seroconversion brings may be understood psychoanalytically as reducing the traumatic threat of the real, since the prospect of death narrows the real to a single, identifiable point on the horizon" (152). Dean proposes that one solution to sex ed and AIDS is, rather than advocating monogamy or promiscuity, that we understand sexual activity as a range of instances, as something impersonal, something related to body parts that might not even be the genitals (171-172).

Chapter FIve argues that desire is "in" language, but it is not linguistic, and argues against rhetorical understandings of desire, such as Butlers. Dean theorizes "bodies that mutter" that produce "signs that are not immediately legible even as something requiring reading," something that "obliquely indicate desire in the form of a failure in the Other's discourse" (202).

In Chapter Six, Dean argues for anti-normative politics, arguing that "the queer is not opposed to the normal, but fissures it from within" (245). Thus, he argues in his conclusion that we should move beyond "sexuality," "gentility," and "heterosexuality as paradigm and norm," and beyond identity politics (272). Sexuality should be understood as impersonal, attached to objects, not persons or gender. show less

A so-so academic books on a titillating topic. Some tiresome moral handwringing accompanied its publication. Wish it had dispensed with the Freudian babble, or else justified it; author carries on as though it's not a contentious system of thought.

An excellent book on Lacan.