Fashioning a bareback pedagogy: towards a theory of risky (sex) education

Abstract

In this paper, the author moves to think through the practice of barebacking to investigate the ways in which sex education fashions subjects and vice versa. Using recent scholarship and the emergence of barebacking, the author thinks through the discourses on this sexual culture and how doing so might allow sex education to move beyond merely thinking about sex to a more risky version of sex education. The author's intentions are to counter-intuitively use the figure of the ‘barebacker’ as a lifestyle for thinking through sex education in the twenty-first century to explore potential pedagogical insights where pedagogy is viewed not simply as methods of teaching or the art of teaching but as the process of fashioning the self through relationships with knowledge, the self and other. The phenomenon of the barebacker allows for an exploration of possible ways of coming into presence. This task requires grappling with the risks inherent in sex education to engage how subjects emerge in relationship to other subjects and how sex education edits out particular types of sexual subjects.

Keywords:

• risk
• ethics
• barebacking
• sex education
• HIV/AIDS

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his appreciation to the four anonymous reviewers from Sex Education along with Justin Thorpe, Adrianne Slaton, Patrick Gauld and the Critical Studies Reading Group at Michigan State University for their assistance in the development of this paper.

Notes

^1. Earlier publicised accounts of barebacking emerged in Poz magazine (Gendin 1997) and Out (Signorile 1997). In the late 1990s, there was a growing engagement with barebacking within the gay community with Freeman's article bringing barebacking into the mainstream media, in problematic ways.

^2. For instance, Grov and Parson developed six types in their research: the Committed Bug Chaser, Opportunistic Bug Chaser, Committed Gift Giver, Opportunistic Gift Giver, Serosorter, and Ambiguous Bug Chaser or Gift Giver. For a complete account of these subsets, see Grov and Parson (2006).

^3. See Barthes (2006), The Language of Fashion, for accessible and provocative essays on the logic of fashion later developed in Barthes' The Fashion System.

^4. See Letts and Sears (1999); Meyer (2009); Pinar (1998); Rasmussen, Rofes, and Talburt (2004); Rodriguez and Pinar (2007); Talburt and Steinberg (2000); and Unks (1995) for a variety of approaches and engagements with sexuality in education and the struggles and triumphs of LGBT students and their allies.