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Leading by example : a queer critique of personalization and coercive community governance in Act Up-Paris's operation against the bareback writers
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Davis, Oliver (2015) Leading by example : a queer critique of personalization and coercive community governance in Act Up-Paris's operation against the bareback writers. Sexualities, 18 (1-2). pp. 141-157. doi:10.1177/1363460715569135
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1363460715569135
Abstract
This article advances a queer historiographical critique of Act Up-Paris’s operation against Guillaume Dustan and Erik Rémès, two writers of semi-autobiographical fiction closely associated with bareback in France at the turn of the 21st century. It calls into question the group’s strategy of personalization, its insistence on exemplarity of conduct and its reliance on a problematic if widely accepted view of the necessity of community governance by ‘role model’. Without simply finding in favour of the writers, the article develops and contextualizes, both historically and theoretically (principally by reference to Foucault’s account of the ‘state of emergency’ and the ongoing work of Tim Dean), reservations voiced by some members of the community at the time about the latent ‘fascism’ in Act Up’s attempt to coercively police adherence to the norm of condom use. It argues that Act Up-Paris, alongside its intended objective to police the consensus around safe sex, unwittingly offered a collateral lesson in stigmatizing coercion, which constituted a performative contradiction of a nurturing function it had so effectively played for gay people in the preceding decade. The article concludes by resituating bareback within a continuity of ‘arse-sex-positive’ queer socio-sexual practices.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform | ||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > French Studies | ||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Unsafe sex, Queer theory | ||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Sexualities | ||||
| Publisher: | Sage | ||||
| ISSN: | 1363-4607 | ||||
| Official Date: | February 2015 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Date of first compliant deposit: | 22 January 2016 | ||||
| Volume: | 18 | ||||
| Number: | 1-2 | ||||
| Number of Pages: | 17 | ||||
| Page Range: | pp. 141-157 | ||||
| DOI: | 10.1177/1363460715569135 | ||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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