Time, scholarship and many a sexual (non-)encounter have shown us that barebacking can’t be reduced to some suicidal flirtation. Rather, they have attested to the resilience of barebacking as an omnipresent, though hardly banal, mode of enjoyment for our times: an enjoyment rife with “all the risks endemic to desire” (Lacan, Seminar VIII) yet contingent on material conditions, pharmacological possibilities, (sub-)cultural specificity, and the singularity of every psychic life.     

Why is barebacking so irresistible? How might it distil the contradictions of a world as invested in deferred intimacies as it is in skin-on-skin rituals?  And what becomes of the function, purchase and pleasure of barebacking when medical advances mean that the epidemiological stakes are no longer so high? What about the social and psychic ramifications that make “barebacking” a behemoth signifier of practices marked by (the illusion of) absolute jouissance (Izcovich, 2024)?   

The Queer Analysis Research Group, which thinks psychoanalysis with trans and queer theories, organized a Bareback Now symposium in 2023, where a curated line-up of thinkers considered barebacking in its multiple and shifting cadences: as subculture, politics, fantasy, fetish, philosophy, pedagogy, poetics. In 2026, Bareback Now becomes a full-on conference, a three-day (and night) extravaganza featuring panels, talks, film screenings and a workshop at the legendary Club Church. We will take stock of what barebacking has and can become by approaching it as an all-encompassing world: barebacking is simultaneously everything and never quite enough, or so it seems. Its ecosystem is comprised of a circuitry of tentacular praxes, all of which can guide the theme and direction of paper/panel proposals, from what we hope will be a decidedly non-moralizing bent. These include, but are not limited to: 

• slamming, monkey dust and other chemsex inflections
• the cumdump and the creampie as sites of psychic investment
• bugchasing and strategies of (phallic) virility
• seriality and the gangbang
• gooning, technologies of repetition and regimes of circularity
• mediatization, exhibitionism, voyeurism
• fantasies of transmission and community exchange
• fetishization of the POZ body
• racialization and the virus
• theatrics and props: poppers, pipes, cruel condoms, cock cages…
• a/sociability and enjoyment
• perversion and its many objects
• the management of sexual difference
• harm reduction and harm enhancement
• risk and moral panics
• love, alienation and delusions of intimacy
• death drive and life drive
• symptoms/sinthomes
• masochisms/sadisms
• fisting imaginaries
• piss, scat, taboo sex at the limit
• HIV/AIDS trauma, mourning/melancholia, reparation
• barebacking while trans
• barebacking while cis
• bodily inscriptions: sharpie counts, biohazard tattoos, mods
• animal metaphors

We are primarily interested in radical submissions—no academic prophylaxis here—that think through barebacking with theoretical rigor and in innovative ways. We are open to experimental approaches, methods and forms to explore the questions that barebacking allows us to pose.

Conference activities will take place at the University of Amsterdam (in the center of Amsterdam), Filmhuis Cavia and Club Church. Bareback Now is in-person only. There will be no streaming, recording, or remote presentations. 

Submit your paper abstract [350-400 words with title, institutional affiliation (if any) and email] all in the same file using the link below by Sept. 15 at 11:59p.m. Central European Time (CET).

For panel abstracts [3 papers], include all individual abstracts/info and a short abstract for the panel [250-300 words] in the same submission file. 

Submission link:

https://forms.gle/tcXZ7eHyzPhPQQUV6

Acceptance will be announced Sept. 28. organized by Misha Kavka (m.kavka@uva.nl) and Diego Semerene (d.semerene@uva.nl) 

[submissions accepted only via the link above]