How to Have Sex in a Pandemic

Queer-theoretical accounts of intimacy in particular have been decisively shaped by readings of art and literature and psychoanalytic reflection. In this context, Tim Dean’s 2009 Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking has presented a crucial intervention. For Dean, the practice of condom-less sex and ‘breeding’ becomes a place to reinvent community and ethics. For the past ten years, Dean’s thinking has evolved around questions of infection, pharmaceutical regimes, and the forms of the self and the social that come with them. His talk ‘How to Have Sex in a Pandemic’ echoes the title of Douglas Crimp’s seminal 1987 essay about AIDS ‘How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic?’

This lecture series takes queer theory’s conversation about intimacy as a starting point to discuss some of its cultural possibilities, mediated forms, and philosophical trajectories in the context of Corona.