QMJC 2020 – Party and Play’: Online hook-up devices and the emergence of PNP practices among gay men february

Team: Adrian Farrugia, Duane Duncan, Gemma Nourse and Nyssa Ferguson (Australian Research Centre in Intercourse, health insurance and community, Los Angeles Trobe University)

Kane Race’s (2015) article ‘“Party and play”: on the web hook-up products and also the emergence of PNP methods among gay males’ is really a generative analysis of technologically mediated sexual encounters offering medication usage, or Party ‘n’ Enjoy (PNP) practices. The content traces the complex arrangement of technologies, items and surroundings, together understood as ‘infrastructures’, that form these encounters together with kinds of sociality that emerge therein. Although the article offers an expansive analysis among these infrastructures, we focus mainly on Race’s study of the role of medication usage, generally speaking crystal methamphetamine and GHB (gamma hydroxybutyrate), in these methods and also the implications associated with the analysis for wellness training.

This article comes from an ‘insider-ethnography’ for the changing contexts of HIV prevention in Sydney, Australia.

The wider research features a dataset consists of findings, qualitative interviews and analysis of textual and material that is historical. In this piece, but, Race mainly works together information produced by their own involvement within the sociosexual tradition under research. Most of Race’s argument will be based upon an analysis of screenshots of discussion between him and potential partners that are sexual hook-up phone apps such as for example Grindr and Scruff. The data offer a rich and, indeed, pleasurable encounter with the subject matter of the article while the dataset may be unfamiliar to researchers more used to traditional social science methods commonly encountered in alcohol and other drug journals.

PNP methods or ‘ChemSex’ have actually attracted considerable concern in general general public wellness research and popular tradition (see, including the 2015 Vice documentary Chemsex). As Race contends, within these websites PNP is positioned being a pathogenic website in which dangers connected with medication usage and HIV transmission coalesce. Whilst not doubting the potential risks that will emerge, Race implies that a single concentrate on them ignores exactly exactly how PNP can be a website in which essential social bonds, logics of care and community connection can emerge (256). In focussing regarding the types of pleasure, play, community and care that emerge through PNP, Race concerns theories that are pathologising records of ‘unsafe intercourse’ or medication usage between males that have intercourse with males. Alternatively, he takes really the kinds of sociality that emerge through PNP aided by the goal of ‘equipping individuals with additional mindful methods for navigating them’ (269).

The intake of illicit drugs such as crystal methamphetamine and GHB during PNP activities or ‘extended sessions’ is an integral reason they truly are placed as a general public wellness concern. Race supplies an analysis that is nuanced of usage over these occasions, emphasising that they’re utilized to grow and produce brand brand new bodily capacities that donate to the emergence of unique types of sociality and experimentation. For instance, in discussing methamphetamine that is crystal Race indicates:

The drug … delays ejaculation, often indefinitely, which implies that ‘getting down’ isn’t always the privileged goal of the encounter that is sexual. Instead, what exactly is valued could be the ability to keep give attention to different intimate opportunities and tasks, therefore the power that is staying endurance needed to maintain these erotic engagements.

Race presents a complex image of the types of experimentation or play stated in PNP.

As he argues, extended sessions is grasped as a particular enactment of a ethic of experimentality founded through PNP (268). While usually focussed on pleasure and play, Race is careful to acknowledge that pleasure and desired drug impacts aren’t guaranteed in full, instead are kyrgyzstan mail brides real they truly are experiments that may get array. For instance, participants may eat crystal methamphetamine but struggle to create a fulfilling sexual encounter causing loneliness and frustration as opposed to playful connection that is social. Drug effects then, are grasped to be co-constituted by the infrastructures that produce PNP – technologies, items and surroundings that must definitely be correctly taken into account in any tries to research or elsewhere engage this intimate sociability and associated drug consumption.

The content convincingly demonstrates that PNP is better grasped being a ‘form of play and intimate conjecture in which guys try out physical possibilities to create more expansive experiences of pleasure and masculinity’ (269). The increased exposure of the part of technologies, things and surroundings throws up a challenge for wellness educators and damage decrease more generally speaking.

How exactly does wellness advertising build relationships a completely emergent practice co-produced by way of a complex selection of forces?

For Race, wellness training has to establish mode of engagement providing you with individuals with additional agential ability to navigate the infrastructures that create PNP. For Race,

This will indicate a various kind of wellness education than that which addresses it self to your sovereign, intentional, rational-choice star, since agency is recognized right here, much less a question of specific sovereignty over circumstances, but as something which emerges from provisional relations and accessories. (269)

This is certainly a as a type of health training for which individuals become sensitised towards the emergent capabilities of this forces, including medications, getting back together these infrastructures. Significantly, this really is a strategy that does maybe not position that is pre-emptively wellness methods such as for example PNP of the same quality or bad but alternatively acknowledges and works together the pleasures and dangers that emerge from their store.

This really is an exemplory instance of conceptually and methodologically unique research with essential implications for scientists, wellness educators and damage decrease more generally speaking. Race effortlessly contends that by going to to your infrastructures creating – and forms of sociality growing from – PNP, we’re better in a position to develop effective and ethical reactions to them.