‘Coming Out of Your Skin’: Circuit Parties, Pleasure and the Subject

Abstract

At the heart of health promotion is an unproblematized assumption about a universal fear of dying. Advocates of health promotion try to tap into this fear and use it as a motivating factor to reduce risky practices. When death avoidance is not apparent – or resisted on the part of the subject – this is taken as evidence of the subject’s irrationality or moral depravity. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research conducted on ‘circuit parties’ – large, all-night dance parties attended primarily by gay men – to argue that this assumption is neither analytically nor practically productive. I use the bodily pleasures associated with circuit parties to develop an alternative means of thinking about risky practices. Using the work of Axel Honneth to frame the circuit experience, it becomes possible to think about risky practice as a corporally embodied desire for social recognition rather than an expression of the mad immoral subject.