1. Party ‘n’ Play Online hook-up devices and the emergence of PNP practices among gay men
Kane Race
Department of Gender & Cultural Studies
University of Sydney, Australia

2. The renunciative turn
Popular discourses increasingly pin HIV preventionas a possibility that relies on the renunciation of substance use (and sometimes even casual sex!)
To counter this, we need engaged analyses of sex/drug cultures so that the possibilities of safety/care that are immanent within these cultures can be identified and fostered

4. Online hookup sites/apps/locative devices
A new(ish) infrastructure of the sexual encounter
If institutions allocate resources and establish hierarchies of authority
Infrastructures produce capacities and shape encounters in ways that become more or less durable components of everyday routines

5. Party and Play (“PNP”)
Also known as ”partying”, “wired play”, “chem sex”, “extended sessions”
At home; arranged online; involving one or more partners over extended period of time; use of psychoactive substances (typically crystal meth, smoked, GHB); pornography; etc. - a specifically assembled erotic environment.
About 15% - 20% of Sydney gay men had participated in PNP in last 6 months
Approached as a pathogenic site by public health literature
Also a site for the elaboration of specific affective associations

6. 2004 community ed poster NYC

7. In social/political theory, the technological object/commodity is typically positioned as responsible for the demise of sociality, community, politics, etc.
An alternative approach asks “How do objects/devices mediate sociality?” (Object-oriented process studies)

8. Sex as play “Looking to play?”
Georg Simmel, “The sociology of sociability” ([1910] 1949) – role of play-form in the making of sociability
Bruno Latour’s “associology”- challenges the notion that “society” or “community” explains anything – rather these formations need to be explained, by tracing their assemblage.

9. Distinctive features/formations
Pre-specification of practices and desires
Co-construction of fantasy/ erotic speculation
Wired play/ extended sessions

10. Serosorting

11. The emergence of undetectable identity

13. Sexual speculation

14. Generative encounters
“the crystallization of their fantasies in the texts that constitute the vehicle for their interaction is akin to the joint construction of a script” (P. Adam et al. 2011: 507).
N.B Here desires, intentions and even identities do not precede the online encounter in any simple sense, but can be understood to emerge from it through a process of eventuation.
(On eventuation see Race, “Complex events”, forthcoming this year in Contemporary Drug Problems)

15. Group play/ extended sessions

16. What are some implications for HIV prevention and education?
Requires a different form of health education than that which addresses itself to the sovereign, intentional, calculative, rational-choice actor.
It becomes impossible to classify any individual element in a sexual assemblage as good or bad since their properties are emergent
What matters is the manner in which various different elements come together in an assemblage to generate specific effects (whether good or bad) – and it is this coming together that requires specific attention and vigilance.
A training in potentialities (both promising and dangerous) – what I call “speculative pragmatism”
Promoting this mode of attention might become the goal of a new form of sexual health and drug education.

17. Acknowledgements
This research has been supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, “Changing Spaces of HIV Prevention” DP
Thanks to the community of informants who have shared their experiences and impressions of changes to sexual community and gay sexual culture.
Article based on this paper forthcoming this year in Sexualities
Two related pieces forthcoming in Contemporary Drug Problems and Culture, Health & Sexuality.