Care, in all its permutations, is the buzzword of the moment, its meanings draining away in its constant evocation. Here, we briefly expand on older and newer meanings of care in the wake of Covid-19. These include the increasingly blurred boundaries between what has been traditionally understood as "care work" versus "essential work"; desperate attempts by corporations to promote themselves as 'caring'; and the adoption of reactionary rather than progressive models of 'care' by populist leaders such as Trump, Johnson, and Bolsonaro. We then argue that we are in urgent need of a politics that recognises our mutual interdependence and vulnerability. Rejecting the extensive carelessness so evident today, our model of 'universal care' calls for inventive forms of collective care at every scale of life. We envisage a world in which genuine care is everywhere-from our most intimate ties to our relationship with the planet itself.

Since 2011, various public health organisations have observed the growth of the sexual practice 'chemsex' in the UK, primarily in London. The term chemsex refers to group sexual encounters between gay and bisexual men in which the recreational drugs GHB/GBL, mephedrone and crystallised methamphetamine are consumed. This article uses a conjunctural perspective to make sense of the rise of chemsex within the historical conditions in which it has emerged. Drawing on a document analysis as well as interviews with 15 gay and bisexual men, this article argues that the rise of chemsex can be interpreted as an embodied response to material conditions shaped by neoliberalism: specifically as a desire for an intimate mode of collectivity during an historical moment when collectivity itself is being superseded by competitive individualism as the privileged mode of being in the world (Gilbert 2013). In doing so, this article provides a different account to pathologising media and medical representations of chemsex that appeared in 2015, whilst also contributing to a growing literature that attempts to map the balance of forces of the present conjuncture.

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