Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities

When, in 2019, I started planning a conference that would take place in September 2020 at the University of Exeter, my aim was to bring together a wide variety of scholars to reflect on the viral modes of contemporary masculinities. The conference was being planned in the context of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellows grant I had been awarded, thanks to which I had been researching contemporary gay “pig” sex subcultures. That is, a kind of contemporary gay male subculture anchored in the eroticization of bodily fluid exchanges and of the corruption of the whole, self-contained, and impermeable male body hegemonically idealized in modern European thought. In a biopolitical context in which HIV infection had become something one can self-manage through highly active antiretroviral therapies, or otherwise avoid with pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) drug regimens, I contended that the twenty-first-century erotic investment in bodily fluids and transgression of the boundaries of the idealized bourgeois body makes gay “pig” subcultures a rich field of practice that can help us think about new and hopefully more capacious ways of relating to the other that no longer require identification and recognition as preconditions. Emerging at the intersection of twenty-first-century sex media, pharmacotechnologies, and sex practices, gay “pigs” are porous creatures that can simultaneously point toward new kinds of relating, of sociability, of ethics, while at the same time still often manifesting and reinforcing some of the traits that have historically defined modern European masculinities (Florêncio 2020). In short, the literal opening up of their masculinity, which I saw—and continue to see—as ethically and politically promising, still often remained dependent on a strengthening of other traits coded as masculine: endurance, athleticism, resilience, heroism, and so on; as if masculinities weren't a static monolith but indeed a fleshy psychosexual reality that manages to survive precisely because it is plastic, adaptable, receptive to change. Diversity ensures the survival of any species, I guess.

This issue's cover image: As part of the same AHRC-funded research project about gay male “pig” masculinities that led to the conference behind this special issue, I had the pleasure of working with an incredible film crew to produce a short experimental documentary titled Oink!. Having originally planned to shoot a feature-length documentary, the first COVID-19 lockdown was eventually announced to come into force one week after we had planned to start filming in Berlin. Adding to all the anxieties associated with a new, not fully-known, pandemic, we had to change our filming schedule and concept in order to respond to the virus. As such, a film that we had planned to film over a whole month and across a variety of locations, private and public, to document a gay male sex culture in which exchanges of bodily fluids have a core role, we were forced to condense filming into the last week before lockdown and to cut out all the plans to film in sex clubs and dark rooms. The film thus gained an unexpected layer of nostalgia for a very recent time when bodies had been able to touch and exchange fluids (once again) without fear. For the most part, the bodies in the film are alone in their private spaces, and intimacy and the intensity of sex becomes something that is only talked about, visually alluded to, but never shown. In that context, the photo in the cover of this issue, a production photo I took during filming, is somewhat charged with that very longing. It no longer just depicts a man looking for a hookup on a mobile phone app, but it also signals the painful desire for human contact—for touch, sex, and intimacy—at a time when public health measures were about to be put in place that would restrict the satisfaction of that important human need. I would like to thank Liz Rosenfeld, Rob Eagle, Rufai Ajala, and Liam Byrne for having gone through that journey with me. And special thanks to Giovanni, depicted in the cover image, for his hospitality and candor.

Discourses of bottoming-related “risk” are paradoxical. Post-Bersani, queer theorists tend to simultaneously own and disavow bottomly risk, celebrating it as subjectivity-shattering, while “forgetting” its bottom-specificity, allowing tops to claim “risk” without experiencing it. This article explores the centrality (and forgetting) of bottoms to queer theorizations of subjective-shattering, in conversation with similarly contradictory mobilizations of bottomly risk as guarantor of responsible sexual behavior, specifically in the PrEP debates in public discourse, arguing that theoretical and health/community discourses both simultaneously inflate and minimize bottomly risk. Claimed as quintessential queer theoretical subversion, it is often erased in its specifically receptive capacity, while in health discourse, it is presented as a crucial deterrent to bad behavior, but one whose riskiness can be adequately dealt with via that very deterrence.

This article introduces the character of the viral God warrior: the online/offline represented/performed self of Christianity, nationalism (e.g., Christian Nationalism), muscular masculinity, and, significantly, whiteness. Through an online ethnography focusing on critical visual and discourse analyses, and critically reading semiotic signposts and codes, the article suggests that this emergent masculinity is complex, contradictory, and not easily categorized as “open” or “closed,” toxic or desirable. It is, like masculinity more broadly, hybridized, dynamically fluid, and intersectional. Nonetheless, it is a troubling masculinity in the way it allows for a meeting of extremism and the mainstream and acts as a sanitizing mask (through the vectors of faith, health and patriotism) that belies latent racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and authoritarian (and fascistic) characteristics that virally disseminate through broader society and culture.

On digital hook-up apps for same-sex attracted men, it is common to read requests for “discretion” from “discreet” men expecting others be the same. Such discretionary language is not new but has evolved and shifted as it became coded into the affordances of hook-up apps. We argue to be discreet is not necessarily to be “closeted” or to be a “MSM” (man who has sex with men). Drawing on our research of men who engage with online same-sex hook-ups, we consider the context of discretionary language used. We discuss how this illustrates the paradox of discretionary language, where requests for discretion typically imply the requester is seeking to act indiscreetly in some fashion.

What comes after the New Man? An urgent dilemma for twenty-first-century anti-fascism is the global resurgence of a radical right masculinist consciousness that is at once nostalgic for strictly codified and hierarchical symbols of manhood while culturally immersed in accelerative, amorphous, and acentric digital networks. I trace this precarious and unsettled ultra-masculinity back to the material context of fascist psychedelic experimentation with consciousness in the sixties counterculture, through the example of the Lyman Family, to contend that Acid Fascism provides a new and important way to think about an emerging desire for an experimental—rather than utopian—reactionary manhood. Alt-right subjectivity requires a theoretical approach toward technological acceleration that is at ease with morphing affective complexions of nostalgic and paranoid masculine sensibility.

In this article I develop the concept of paranoid masculinities, which seeks to provide a theoretical lens for analyzing defensive push-back of hegemonic male identities against what they regard as the undermining forces of emasculation. Building on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this concept offers a historically situated account of masculine identity, which is conceptualized as dynamic, relational, and based on affectivity. The historical context that the concept seeks to account for is here characterized as the age of universal contagion, which is defined by escalating rhythms of capitalist economy intensifying circulation and contact of people and commodities. The concept of paranoid masculinities is developed through examining the transition from human-operated cars to AI-powered vehicles, which are perceived as contaminating hegemonic masculinity, and thus paranoidly resisted.