Narcofeminist ‘chemsex’: Rethinking sexualised drug use in a shifting queer landscape marked by public health emergency

Abstract

The potential of sexualised drug use to enact the queer body is largely unaccounted for within the expert public health knowledges where ‘chemsex’ is produced as a predominantly cisgender gay male practice harmful to health. Underpinned by such logics, COVID-19 prevention measures in 2020–2021 limited urban nightlife, which can be thought of as a queer ‘intimate infrastructure’, restricting chemsex to the home. Such changes in routine afforded by public health emergencies provide a particularly clear glimpse into the emergent and situated production of queer bodies. Drawing on ontopolitical research in drug studies, which treats bodily capacities as products of sociomaterial arrangements, I explore the generative effects that emerge from a shifting landscape of sex and drug practices. I draw on in-depth qualitative interviews with members of queer feminist collectives in Berlin, Germany at the time of the lockdowns to ask: what kind of community is enacted through an abrupt transformation in the material settings of sexualised drug use? I argue that the landscape of the home was co-constitutive of a queer narcofeminist collective body, providing an incisive rebuke not only of public health discourse on chemsex, but also of the bifurcation of ‘intimate infrastructure’ into the privatised heteronormative home versus the public gay dark room.