Bodies That Shatter : To What Extent is Pychoanalysis Useful in Explaining Gay Desires for Sexual Risk, in Relation to Chemsex?

R. McDonald

The act of taking risks in a sexual context is by no means new. One may think immediately of BDSM (Bondage, Domination and Sadomasochism): its associations with tangible pain and the rituals and lifestyles surrounding it render BDSM a clear example of the profoundness and commonplace nature of the fetishisation of sexual risk. Likewise, the variety of ways in which one may engage in BDSM (and the plethora of reasons one may desire it) also show it to be site open to subjective definition. Interestingly however, there are forms of ?risk sexualisation? that occur within urban gay communities such as bareback, bug-chasing and chemsex that have particular processes of psychic risk sexualisation unique to ? and entangled with ? the historical social positioning of the gay male, thus making them distinct from other forms of sexual risk, while sharing similar terrain. Understanding how the changing social positioning of the gay male has enabled particular sexual practices or ?sexualisations? to occur is a sensitive affair that requires both an understanding of the political, social and medical discourses that embellish the symbol of the gay male in the cultural imaginary, and an understanding of the psychic process that determine how one psychosexually responds to and internalises information ? as a gay male - that may influence their sexual desires and practices. This paper attempts to satisfy the titular question through looking inward at psychoanalysis as a discipline, specifically the work of Melanie Klein, Freud, Bersani and Dean as well as outward towards the object of study: gay sexual risk. By examining the changing relational dynamic between the discipline and object of study, alongside a critical analysis of how psychoanalysis has - at different points - failed and succeeded in explaining gay desires for sexual risk; this paper hopes to offer an answer that speaks to: the ways in which psychoanalysis has changed in its approach to sexual risk; how it deals with modern actualisations of gay sexual risk, and how well its tools can blend with other forms of analysis in order to temper its own inabilities to account for such actualisations.