Bottom Value
Critiquing Top Supremacy's Instrumentalization of Bottomly Risk in Queer Theory and the PrEP Debates
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Abstract
Discourses of bottoming-related “risk” are paradoxical. Post-Bersani, queer theorists tend to simultaneously own and disavow bottomly risk, celebrating it as subjectivity-shattering, while “forgetting” its bottom-specificity, allowing tops to claim “risk” without experiencing it. This article explores the centrality (and forgetting) of bottoms to queer theorizations of subjective-shattering, in conversation with similarly contradictory mobilizations of bottomly risk as guarantor of responsible sexual behavior, specifically in the PrEP debates in public discourse, arguing that theoretical and health/community discourses both simultaneously inflate and minimize bottomly risk. Claimed as quintessential queer theoretical subversion, it is often erased in its specifically receptive capacity, while in health discourse, it is presented as a crucial deterrent to bad behavior, but one whose riskiness can be adequately dealt with via that very deterrence.
Contributor Notes
Jordana Greenblatt teaches literature and academic writing at York University and the University of Toronto. Their research focuses on sexuality in contemporary literature and culture, comics, and legal texts. Their publications include the collection Querying Consent (Rutgers UP 2018), as well as recent articles on HIV/AIDS graphic memoir and on sadomasochism in (variously) law, literature, and circus. Email: jmgreenblatt@gmail.com; ORCID: