A special issue of Sexualities: Bareback sex and queer theory across three national contexts (France, UK, USA)

To use the word ‘bareback’ to refer to condomless anal sex between men is to evoke the almost caricaturally US-American world of cowboys and rodeos to which the coinage of the term, in the mid-1990s, gestured salaciously (Rofes, 1998). This special issue offers new insight into bareback, as sexual practice and subcultural phenomenon, by investigating how it has been apprehended by queer theory and queer thinking within and across three national contexts: the US, in which bareback was first named and elaborated into an identifiable subculture and which is most prevalent in existing research (medical, sociological and historical alike), France and the UK. The dual objective is both to say something queer about bareback and to use bareback and the discussion it has sparked to reveal something about the respective states of queer thinking within these national contexts.