Queer Barriers: Safer Sex Technologies and the Politics of Risk

In this talk I combine archival and interview-based research with the lens of feminist science studies to interrogate the politics of queer safer sex technologies. Focusing on the use of gloves and dental dams, I argue that rather than merely preventing the transmission of microbes these technologies mobilize a particular set of politics surrounding risk and identity. In addition to claiming a space for the legitimacy of queer sex and nonnormative bodies, gloves and dams constitute a queer ....