"...I am speaking of something different - not of a mysteriously predetermined and permanently fixed orientation, but of the inevitable, unpredictable, and variable processes by which desire becomes attached to persons ...[where]..Homosexual desire is a desire for the same from the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself" (Bersani, 1995:59-60).
"...In psychoanalytic terms, the relation between gender and sexuality is in part negotiated through the question of the relationship between identification and desire. And here It becomes clear why refusing to draw lines of causal implication between of their complex inter implication" (Butler 1993:239).
The title of this paper comes directly from my recently completed MA thesis which aimed to open up for consideration a range of factors that mediate between the knowledge and practice of (the ubiquitous) safe sex. Reflecting on this title, it is important to specify the particular arena it was attempting to examine, namely the desire to investigate how we formulate and interpret narratives that run along the following lines: X, Y or 2 "knew" about safe sex, so why did they, on occasion, engage in unsafe sex (with sometimes fatal consequences). Asking subjects for their accounts of such incidents, they find it difficult to explain or account for sessions or episodes of unsafe sex. Somehow, it just seemed to happen, where one thing led to another, and the heat of the moment was paramount, sometimes with the dire consequences of becoming HIV positive. Similarly, some safe sex educators and those people actively engaged in HIV prevention and safe sex ex promotion have admitted the personal difficulty in practicing safe sex themselves - each time and every time. Parallels could arguably be drawn in other areas of human conduct such as smoking, drink driving, drug taking and teenage pregnancy, where we are urged to take some form of prevention, exercise caution, be(come) mindful and aware of the risks, the unanticipated and unintended consequences of our actions. These scenarios could be argued to signify some of the questions we as researchers and or educators presently face with respect to HIV/AIDS. How do we go about exploring these 'spits'?, which could be characterized as a discontinuity between knowledge and practice of safe sex.
This paper then focuses on the area of sexual conduct, where it seems we are having to exercise a constant, self-imposed surveillance and vigilance over our desires and our actions, when we are 'turned on' in the emotionally-charged 'heat of the moment'. To address this situation, I propose to take seriously the idea that sexual practices - a domain more commonly known as our 'sex-life' - constitutes an area that is not simply amenable to rational organization. I n short, increasing rationality brought to bear on sexual conduct "has not been synonymous with an enhanced understanding of self and others, or the promotion of moral progress and human happiness (Smart 1992:162). This suggestion is however not intended as a cause for an elegy of despair, or an abandonment of pro-activism, but rather a chance to realize that "increasing rationality cannot guarantee increases in freedom" and sexual fulfillment where "one important implication...-is that changing the world cannot be divorced from the unavoidable necessity of continuing to (re)interpret it" (ibid 1992:220).
It is widely recognized that a large investment in knowledge, rationality and reason as key components of HIV prevention and education strategies is substantially limited. Such strategies tend to advocate: 1. an increase in levels of personal self-awareness through personal risks to HIV/AIDS and STDs; 2. describing a range of techniques that help the 'negotiation' of safe sex within the inter-personal and subjective drama of 'eroticism and desire'. These however, seem not enough to ensure that continued practice of safe sex, and are unable to offer guaranteeable outcomes in the arena of 'private' sexual practices. There appears to be no reliable guarantee that such 'knowledge' ensures the desire and practice of safe sex (Ingham 1992; Browne and Minichiello 1992, 1996). Moreover, it seems likely that sexual practices have the capacity to by-pass and disrupt the "If...I practice unsafe sex...then I am at a high risk of HIV infection" framework, which I argue implicitly informs some of the aims of HIV education strategies.
Here, the place of reason in sexual conduct is problematic. The search for rationality in 'unsafe sex' and indeed in all sexual practices, could be argued to be an unrealistic expectation or excessive faith in those spheres of experience that could be termed unpredictable. The desire for predictability in the area of sexual conduct, then aims to examine aspects of sex that make it enjoyable and desirable, namely elements of surprise, spontaneity, play and or improvisation. I want to suggest that sexual conduct is always and already negotiated through aspects of desire. If we take this contention seriously, then our knowledge - here I am thinking of educating about the facts of HIV infection, safe sex techniques, negotiation skills, knowing that condoms protect, the 'shoulds' and the oughts of 'safe sex' - is constantly mediated and intersected by the pervasive presence and flavour of desire. In other words, given that safe sex has been primarily located in the 'knowledge' domain (as opposed to desire), how might research and education look that takes into account 'desire'? How do 'we' provide a context for an inquiry into the place of desire in sexual conduct while taking up the challenge(s) that it poses to the way sexual practices come to (still) be meaningful encounters?
A sociology of knowledge around the brief yet turbulent history of HIV/AIDS research would demonstrate that desire is an excluded (and marginalized) aspect of this agenda. Moreover, a detailed review of HIV/AIDS social research to date could indicate the popularity and the presence of "knowledge" (as an object of investigation) in stark contrast to the marginality of desire - characterized by its 'softly spoken', pervasive ambiguous tones where one commentator suggests that "...desire is multifaceted, contradictory, subversive: its inevitable social organization requires that we are engaged in a continuous conversation about both its possibilities and its limits (Weeks 1994: 50) If desire has been located and marginalized in the 'penumbra' of knowledge, then this conference may come to signify and claim that "Desire! Your time has come!"
Perhaps I was hopeful in my title that desire might become resurrected as the lost 'Other', the displaced Real component that will have been the gold mine for innovative research and effective HIV education strategies. Attention needs to be drawn to my question-title on two accounts. Firstly, given that people already 'know' about safe sex, and/or they receive education about safe sex (knowing what they ought to do), can desire just be plugged in to that question as a crucial factor that happens to have a recent history of being overlooked? Its presence on the agenda could then be seen to modify and improve the ways in which we (continue) to conduct our research. Secondly, is 'knowledge-and-desire' a binary opposition relating to the same unified experience? What is their relatedness to each other? Do those two aspects of sexual conduct orbit and influence each other as the question might pre-suppose where desire that has the capacity to override, preside, take precedence (even momentarily) over 'knowledge.'
Now that we seem more willing to talk of desire's part in the complexities of sexual practices, our research questions and frameworks around those experiences necessarily beg re-examination. In retrospect, my title uncritically pitted 'desire' against 'knowledge' - where passions and pleasures opposed reason and rationality as a way of exercising ambiguity, confusion, unpredictability and uncertainty from the practical and perceived limitations of HIV/AIDS research and educative interventions. Indeed our aims and projects in the HIV/AIDS research field are necessary cause for self-critical reflection, in the outcomes such agendas would hope to achieve. Somehow this is a difficult yet necessary task to juggle these questions of research, intervention and outcomes, simultaneously.
Desire could be argued to have a capacity to generate a distinct narrative that follows a trajectory involved in staging its own dramatic presentation of actuality and experience - by-passing a rational and reasoned (hence predictable) type of narrative - in favour of its own partial, sometimes contradictory 'meaningful experience'. Examples of this could be seen in narratives that use the heat of the moment, and being carried away in the sexual encounter as a way of accounting for unsafe episodes. I put quotes around these 'meaningful experiences' to alert treating them as having a predictable, consistent 'nature' or as part of "unconstructed evidence of experience" as Joan Scott has persuasively argued (1992). Yet, desire could be provisionally treated as coming into being, in a similar fashion to the way Butler (1993) provocatively argues for "subjects" and "acts" come to have meaning i.e. "...as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface, we call matter" (Butler 1993:9). My suggestion is that desires are always already constructed around a plurality of sites: what (we consider) is a natural, universal need for 'sex' with its (often 'problematic') place in our lives, mediating our sexual relationships, and allowing the experience of human subjectivity where 'sexuality and desire are part of the intensity and passion of life itself' (Grosz 1994:77).
This is not to install desire as a causative, universal element that is a prime untainted source of sexual agency, or the single source that structures sexual conduct. or that desire is the sole, primary and productive site of investigation, "all would be revealed, if only we were to conduct our research at this (universal and natural) level, the unspoiled site and emanation of all sexual practices". Rather, a focus could be to examine the plurality of sites through which desire is constituted: the subject, the acts, the encounter the subjectivity and passion where Weeks (1995) has evocatively claimed that "in a world of apparently constant flux, where the fixed points keep moving or dissolving, we hold on to what seems most tangible, the truth of our bodily needs and desires, or, in the age of AIDS, our vulnerability...we assert the imperatives of its desires and potentiality for pleasure (though they often wrack us with their contradictory messages) to confirm a single bodily truth...The socio-sexual identities we adopt, inhabit and adapt work insofar as they order and give meaning to individual needs and desires, but they are not emanation of those needs and desires," To consider the problematic ontology of desire begs the question of how we have carved up the domain of sexual practices and our assumptions about the 'unified, rational and sexualized' 'subject'.
I am suggesting that reflecting on desire in the domain of education and prevention opens up the challenge of how we might educate around a notion of desire - a desire that may displace 'knowledge' and resists becoming a permanent, fixed and predictable aspect of a person's sexual identification and practice. Firstly, it appears important to recognize the plurality of desire, where in one case, Butler (1993) has argued that "it is quite possible to have overlapping identification and desire in heterosexual homosexual exchanges" (1993:283) and in another, desire pervades, seeps in, permeates and flavours sexual conduct rather than structures or determines sexual practices.
Desire, as a subject of HIV/AIDS research, now surfaces in the face of incurable effects of unsafe sex which painfully dramatizes and signifies the unintended consequences of some of our sexual conduct. Recognizing the limits of reason in sexual conduct, the subject of desire appears as a promising agenda. To this end, I suggest that the range of factors that mediate between knowledge and practice of safe sex and sexual practices could fruitfully be explored through the excluded and marginalized notions of desire. I suggest that what is at stake here firstly, is the problematic place of reason and rationality in sexual conduct and secondly, the way we as researchers and educators construct interpretations about those arenas of sexual conduct (especially unsafe sex) with recourse to reason. Here, the aim is to predict sexual behaviour by the desire to track down the determinants, and dis-cover the rationality of unsafe sex (albeit within arbitrarily drawn domains such as heterosexual teenagers, gay community attached homosexuals, gay youth, heterosexual populations for example).
Revalorizing desire then does not negate an important aspect of the 'facts' about HIV infection and methods/strategies of prevention. Given that 'facts' do not offer or promise guaranteeable outcomes or certainties in sexual practices especially with respect to HIV/AIDS, does not erase the possibility that they could be(come) meaningful to the inter-personal, social and subjective/emotionally mediated arena of sexual practices. One of the problems at hand then is how might we operationalize this pervasive aspect of desire? The aim would be to work with desire rather than continue to find it cut across and subvert what a subject knows, that it flies in the face of a reasoned attitude that seeks to bring an awareness of unintended consequences of our actions especially in the urgent and immediate case of HIV infection and education strategies. Indeed, it challenges us to be critical of our assumptions about desiring subjects rather than as (uncritically) treating them subjects that make rational and reasoned decisions in their sexual encounters. AIDS brings with it the challenge of living passionately, even within the personal and political crises where we grow tired of hearing the 'lack' or the 'immanence' of a scientific cure for AIDS. Yet how we might go about minimizing the unnecessary loss of life it has left in its wake while keeping alive our desires and pleasures.
BIBLlOGRAPHY
Bersani, Leo (1995) HOMOS, Harvard University Press, London. ,
Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", Routledge, New York.
Ingham, R., et al (1992) "The Limitations of rational Decision-Making Models as Applied to Young People's Sexual Behaviour" in AIDS: Rights, Risks and Reasons, Aggleton, P et al, eds. Falmer Press, London.
Smart, Barry (1992) Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies, Routledge, London.
Weeks, J., (1994) Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity, Rivers Oram Press, London.
[ Home Page ][ Site Map ][ Links ][ Feedback ][ Submit ][
HIV Prevention Services ]
[ Berkeley Free Clinic ][
Confession Box ][ Counselor
Resources ][ Relationships ][ Theorizing Desire ]