Recent Sociology PhD graduate Emerich Daroya has published an article in Sexuality and Culture

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. Considerations of stealthing have largely been framed as a legal problem based on the notion of consent or the lack thereof. However, such examinations may be oversimplistic, failing to recognize how GBQM negotiate and understand sexual consent and stealthing. 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. 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. 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. However, stealthing may be morally acceptable for others, especially in anonymous sexual spaces, like bathhouses, where there is a culture of silence. Consent is perceived to be passively given in these spaces because the normative idea of consent as a communicative exchange is constrained. The article highlights the ways in which sexual scenarios and environments are implicated in the remaking of alternative conceptualizations of sexual morality and “consent.”