Bottom Value

Discourses of bottoming-related “risk” are paradoxical. Post-Bersani, queer theorists tend to simultaneously own and disavow bottomly risk, celebrating it as subjectivity-shattering, while “forgetting” its bottom-specificity, allowing tops to claim “risk” without experiencing it. This article explores the centrality (and forgetting) of bottoms to queer theorizations of subjective-shattering, in conversation with similarly contradictory mobilizations of bottomly risk as guarantor of responsible sexual behavior, specifically in the PrEP debates in public discourse, arguing that theoretical and health/community discourses both simultaneously inflate and minimize bottomly risk. Claimed as quintessential queer theoretical subversion, it is often erased in its specifically receptive capacity, while in health discourse, it is presented as a crucial deterrent to bad behavior, but one whose riskiness can be adequately dealt with via that very deterrence.