Your HIV-positive sperm, my trans-dyke uterus: Anti/futurity and the politics of bareback sex between Guillaume Dustan and Beatriz Preciado

Contemporary queer theorist Beatriz Preciado’s hypothetical bareback encounter with her friend and former editor, the HIV-positive writer Guillaume Dustan, explores her own understanding of the origins of queer politics in the AIDS crisis. Dustan’s ‘insurrectional’ writing, particularly his views on bareback sex, made him party to a bitter feud with anti-AIDS group Act Up-Paris. I consider what is at stake in Preciado’s eventual refusal of such an encounter with Dustan before his death, her understanding of Dustan’s queer politics as a ‘path of death’, and finally the influence of these ideas on notions of futurity in Preciado’s own thought.