On the advancing frontiers of the Delorian noösphere, humanity confronts a proliferation of neo‐Lamarckian challenges and opportunities to create new geographies of planetary evolution. New, unconventional perspectives are possible with a synthesis of David Harvey’s theory of co‐evolutionary spheres of change in human and non‐human relations, Vine Deloria, Jr.’s analysis of Indigenous/Western settler‐colonial dialectics of space and time, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s portrayal of a noösphere of planetary consciousness. This paper explores some of the contradictions of these old and new processes in the evolution of geography and the geography of evolution.
Old struggles continue even as today’s geographic thought evolves at an accelerating pace, amidst the dramatic transformations wrought by CRISPR gene‐editing technoscience and the consolidation of computational‐cultural forms of accumulation in surveillance capitalism. The formal institutional entity we today call ‘Geography’ only exists because of nineteenth‐century struggles over the science, theology, and politics of human evolution. The article highlights the ways in which sexual scenarios and environments are implicated in the remaking of alternative conceptualizations of sexual morality and “consent.” Consent is perceived to be passively given in these spaces because the normative idea of consent as a communicative exchange is constrained. However, stealthing may be morally acceptable for others, especially in anonymous sexual spaces, like bathhouses, where there is a culture of silence. Some GBQM conceptualize stealthing as morally unacceptable when considered through liberal/contractual consent and HIV criminalization, where the materialities of condoms (their alteration or removal) and HIV status (lying about or not disclosing) play crucial roles.
Examining online discussion board postings from a popular barebacking website, I argue that views about stealthing’s moral acceptability emerges through various relations involving more-than-human entities. Mobilizing “sexuality-assemblages” frameworks, this article explores the relationship between GBQM and their physical, social, and technological contexts in shaping articulations of sexual consent and stealthing. However, such examinations may be oversimplistic, failing to recognize how GBQM negotiate and understand sexual consent and stealthing. Considerations of stealthing have largely been framed as a legal problem based on the notion of consent or the lack thereof. This paper explores how gay, bisexual, and queer men (GBQM) discuss “stealthing,” the removal (or alteration) of condoms and ejaculation during penetration without consent, in a barebacking (or condomless sex) online forum. Our approach is based on provisional assemblage thinking as it offers the possibility to think the complex connections between biomedical innovations in the field of HIV, sexual practices, subjectivity, pleasure, spaces, and technologies, going beyond the subdisciplinary preoccupations and methodological reflexes of geographers focused primarily on either health or sexuality.
This article proposes a distinctly geographical contribution to analysing and interpreting these biomedical technologies, exploring the ways that new spatialities and spatial relations emerge from their use and circulation. While human geographers have been slow to engage with the changing social dimensions brought by these innovations, scholars across the whole spectrum of the social sciences have been far more creative and responsive contributing to a critical understanding of what these processes entail in terms of subject formation as well as social and communal relations. Recent biomedical innovations in the field of HIV prevention and treatment – namely PrEP, TasP, and ‘undetectability’ – have completely reshaped the experience of living with HIV, as well as the meanings of ‘risk’ and ‘safety’ in relation to sexual practices, leading to new forms of pleasure and sociality for gay and bisexual men in the Minority World.