Breeding futures: masculinity and the ethics of CUMmunion in Treasure Island Media’s Viral Loads

ABSTRACT

In a recent interview, pornographer Paul Morris claimed his studio, Treasure Island Media, is a ‘laboratory exploring the vital sexual symbiosis of human and viral DNA’. Departing from that claim, I examine his porn text Viral Loads to explore its implications for thinking future-orientated masculinities and community formations. I claim that Viral Loads forces us to rethink modern ideals of individual autonomy and bodily integrity, and alludes to alternative community formations enacted not by holding something in common but by relentlessly giving and exchanging foreign matter. By depicting ‘loads’ circulating between bodies posited as interfaces, Viral Loads gives us a porous and impure form of masculinity. In so doing, it breeds a queer future in which community ethics becomes an ethics of CUMmunion, a ‘cummoning’ with strangers that is offered as an alternative to the politics of self and other.

KEYWORDS:

• Bareback
• masculinity
• HIV
• immunity
• community
• posthumanism

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this argument were presented at Overflow: Performance Studies international Conference #23 (Kampnagel, Hamburg, 10 June 2017), and Doing Sex: Men, Masculinities and Sexual Practices (Newcastle University, Newcastle, 13 July 2017). The author is grateful to John Mercer for his invaluable feedback while writing and revising this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

João Florêncio is a lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, UK. His interdisciplinary research navigates the intersections of visual culture and performance studies with queer theory, philosophy, medical humanities, and posthumanism, in an attempt to probe the porous boundaries of the body and think inhuman forms of embodiment, desire, ethics, and community.

ORCID

João Florêncio http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1817-5648

Notes

1 ‘Post-AIDS world’ is a problematic term given how it can lead us to overlook the obscenely unequal levels of access to HIV care among different regions of the planet, ethnicities, and socio-economic strata. With that proviso in mind, the term is used here to refer to the places – geographical, cultural, and social – where, because of access to antiretroviral therapies, an AIDS diagnosis is no longer the expected prognosis of HIV infection.

2 While not aiming to provide an exhaustive list, this article is indebted to previous discussions of TIM by Tim Dean (2009, 2015), Chris Ashford (2015), Susanna Paasonen (Morris and Paasonen 2014), Byron Lee (2014), Michael McNamara (2013), and Christien Garcia (2013).

3 See, for instance McCasker (2014), Clark-Flory (2014), and Terrell (2015).

4 ‘Pythagorae Socratisque & Platonis mos erat ubique divina mysteria figuris involucrisque obtegere, sapientiam suam contra Sophistarum iactantiam modeste dissimulare, iocari serio, & studiosissime ludere’ (Ficino 1962, 125). While Maude Vanhaelen’s translation (Ficino 2012, 33) uses the phrase ‘to jest in seriousness and to joke in the greatest earnest’, I decided to substitute ‘to joke’ by ‘to play’, following Michael Allen’s (1986, 438) translation, as ‘to play’ is also often used by gay men to mean ‘to have sex’.

5 According to Anecdotes by the Rev. Percival Stockdale, one of the published sources where Johnson’s sentence can be found, the correct wording should actually have been ‘for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’ (Birkbeck Hill 1897, 333; original emphasis).

6 Available at http://store.treasureislandmedia.com/VIRAL-LOADS.html. Accessed December 13 2017.

7 A pighole is a hollow butt plug. Because it is hollow, it allows access to the rectum through it.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council [Grant Number 165749].