GBTQ+ safe sex entanglements: Finding the bacterial in the age of resistant STIs and prevention innovation

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Chandra, Shiva
Broom, Alex
Ridge, Damien
Kenny, Katherine
Peterie, Michelle
Broom, Jennifer
Haire, Bridget
Lafferty, Lise
Treloar, Carla
Raymond, Stephanie
Bradshaw, Catriona
Applegate, Tanya
Guy, Rebecca
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2025
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Abstract

Few studies have explored community experiences of our increasingly resistant bacterial landscape, and, in the sphere of sexually transmissible infections (STIs) and antimicrobial resistance, there is even greater absence of community-centred research. This is despite a growth in STI transmission worldwide, which, alongside accelerated resistance, will disproportionately affect GBTQ+ (gay, bisexual, trans, queer+) populations. In this article, drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted in 2024 with 49 cisgender and trans gay and bisexual men, trans women and gender diverse people, we explore contemporary GBTQ+ safe sex practices as they relate to the growing threat of antibiotic resistant STIs in Australia. Key themes identified where the pharmaceutical turn in safe sex practices, the tensions this produced, the complexities of condom use, and the influence of biographies on safe sex practices. We illustrate how the turn toward pharmaceutical solutions have reconfigured and continues to reconfigure safe sex, giving rise to pleasures that were hitherto ‘off-limits’ to many. However, escalating antibiotic resistance threatens to again alter community practices and relationships to STI prevention measures. Drawing on Barad, we develop these themes to theoretically conceptualise safe sex as not fixed, but as an entanglement that is relationally and iteratively (re)configured through the connections between objects, subjectivities, practices, temporalities, and the human-microbial dynamics entailed therein. Findings suggest public health and clinical communication about resistance should speak to population concerns about gut health, resistance vis-à-vis Doxy-PEP, changing definitions of safe sex, and the importance of pleasure.

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Social Science & Medicine

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379

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© 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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Economics

Health sciences

Human society

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Chandra, S; Broom, A; Ridge, D; Kenny, K; Peterie, M; Broom, J; Haire, B; Lafferty, L; Treloar, C; Raymond, S; Bradshaw, C; Applegate, T; Guy, R, GBTQ plus safe sex entanglements: Finding the bacterial in the age of resistant STIs and prevention innovation, Social Science & Medicine, 2025, 379, pp. 118162

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