Bareback Now 2026

December 9-11, 2026 

University of Amsterdam 

Time, scholarship and many a sexual (non-)encounter have shown us that barebacking can’t be reduced to some suicidal flirtation. Rather, they have attested to the resilience of barebacking as an omnipresent, though hardly banal, mode of enjoyment for our times: an enjoyment rife with “all the risks endemic to desire” (Lacan, Seminar VIII) yet contingent on material conditions, pharmacological possibilities, (sub-)cultural specificity, and the singularity of every psychic life.     

Why is barebacking so irresistible? How might it distil the contradictions of a world as invested in deferred intimacies as it is in skin-on-skin rituals?  And what becomes of the function, purchase and pleasure of barebacking when medical advances mean that the epidemiological stakes are no longer so high? What about the social and psychic ramifications that make “barebacking” a behemoth signifier of practices marked by (the illusion of) absolute jouissance (Izcovich, 2024)?   

The Queer Analysis Research Group, which thinks psychoanalysis with trans and queer theories, organized a Bareback Now symposium in 2023, where a curated line-up of thinkers considered barebacking in its multiple and shifting cadences: as subculture, politics, fantasy, fetish, philosophy, pedagogy, poetics. In 2026, Bareback Now becomes a full-on conference, a three-day (and night) extravaganza featuring panels, talks, film screenings and a workshop at the legendary Club Church. We will take stock of what barebacking has and can become by approaching it as an all-encompassing world: barebacking is simultaneously everything and never quite enough.