Bareback: reflexões sobre a normalização das condutas sexuais

Abstract

Reflecting on homosexuality, AIDS and its social and subjective outcomes in the last 30 years, we discuss the bareback phenomenon - sex without a condom - as named in the United States in the second half of the 1990s. Its dissemination through the media has often caused reactions that reconnect homosexuality with madness, disease and death. Due to the limited academic production in Brazil, we aim to contribute through this work with some essential considerations for the debate. We will cross some historically important shifts relating to homosexuality, the conducts governance practices, risk, AIDS, and bareback itself. In this sense, this work associates a theoretical study on this subject with interviews conducted in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The exploratory empirical research gathered data and reports on this phenomenon in our reality and context, in the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA) and Grupo Pela Vidda-RJ, two nongovernmental organizations that work with the AIDS issue, and the Grupo Arco-Íris, an NGO member of the LGBT movement. Two people from each of these NGOs were interviewed. We tried to understand how these institutions, privileged place in our survey, have approached this phenomenon and what are their positions and viewpoints. Concomitantly, we contacted some volunteers supporters of bareback sex, as we consider their speeches essential, and able to make this work rich, consistent and multilateral, concerning bareback, based on their individual experience. To this end, we accessed two international bareback sites (barebackrt.com and bareback.com) that host profiles of Brazilians, including some residents in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where three practitioners participated in the research. Our hypothesis is that the attempts to decode bareback, giving it a sense, a truth, end up following regulations tracks that have exposed their limits as we realize that the diversity of erotic-sexual practices, singularity and subjectivity of subjects transcend all attempts of normalization / standardization. So we believe that what we call bareback, whether a phenomenon, subculture, practice or behavior, cannot be defined as a cohesive set of discourses, fantasies and erotic-sexual practices, but rather presents itself through even more varied multiple faces, leaving only the idea that characterizes it: sex without a condom does not always mean sex without protection. Thus, with the perspective of the notion of driving behaviors and self care proposed by Michel Foucault, we discussed the meaning of the dissident sexual practices and issues related to standardization, and pathological forms of resistance.