Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking

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 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 show more 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

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.