"It's Like You Use Pots and Pans to Cook. It's the Tool": The Technologies of Safer Sex

Abstract

Safer sex has emerged as a collection of practices and ideas deployed to combat the spread of AIDS. Prevention messages and rituals of safer sex each rely on constructing a potential user's relationship to latex devices. This article is based on an analysis of twenty-seven interviews conducted with people in the sex trade. Since sex workers make it their business to exchange sexual services for economic compensation, many have become extremely sophisticated in their innovations and expressions of eroticism using safer sex techniques. Sex workers are one of a group of key (new) knowledge producers focused on safer sexual practices. Their worlds are metaphoric laboratories for empiri cal studies of emergent sexual practices. This article describes the innovations of the use of technologies of safer sex and the configuration of users.

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