Paper short abstract:

In this paper I approach stories about chemsex as told during the ethnographic interview as risk narratives, rather than as reflections of the ‘truth’ of sexualized drug use. These narratives can be understood as cautionary tales that inspire individual and collective efforts at harm reduction.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an exploration of a methodological challenge that arose from my doctoral research on chemsex scenes in urban India. Due to the ethical and legal limitations on ‘participant observation’ in queer subcultures of sexualized drug use, I relied almost exclusively on ethnographic interviews with interlocutors who tended to stress the negative physical and mental health outcomes of chemsex. How might we make sense of such narratives without resorting to what proponents of ‘critical chemsex studies’ argue are pathologizing and stigmatizing approaches to chemsex as always both resulting from and in trauma (Møller & Hakim 2021)? The paper revolves around the devastating story of Arvind, who lost his partner to addiction-related suicide and contracted HIV through his own involvement in Mumbai’s ‘high fun’ or chemsex scene. Drawing on the conceptualization of illness narratives (Kleinman 1988) in medical anthropology, I propose to treat such stories as narratives of risk that function not just as a way of satisfying the researcher and their (presumed) public health agenda, but also as attempts at reflection and healing. Moreover, chemsex stories – and particularly chemsex stories involving suicides - generate an affective urgency (Chatterjee 2018) that animates both individual and collective efforts at harm reduction, articulated as the desire to do ‘something’ before it is too late. Yet in the process of converting singularly tragic stories like Arvind’s into a generic perception of risk (including through gossip), the specific personal and structural factors that shape vulnerability in the context of chemsex are elided.