Breeding futures: masculinity and the ethics of CUMmunion in Treasure Island Media's Viral Loads

Abstract

In a recent interview, pornographer Paul Morris claimed his studio, Treasure Island Media (TIM), is a ‘laboratory exploring the vital sexual symbiosis of human and viral DNA.’ Departing from that claim, I examine his porn text Viral Loads to explore its implications for thinking future-orientated masculinities and community formations. I claim that Viral Loads forces us to rethink modern ideals of individual autonomy and bodily integrity and alludes to alternative community formations enacted not by holding something in common but by relentlessly giving and exchanging foreign matter. By depicting ‘loads’ circulating between bodies posited as interfaces, Viral Loads gives us a porous and impure form of masculinity. In so doing, it breeds a queer future in which community ethics becomes an ethics of cummunion, a cummoning with strangers that is offered as an alternative to the politics of self and other.