Kane Race

Kane Race approaches drugs and the transformations drugs are taken to induce as significant elements in the crafting of effective histories. He is particularly interested in drug practices emerging in response to HIV/AIDS, from the repurposing of antiretroviral drugs to prevent HIV transmission and 'end HIV' in global HIV policy discourse, to subcultural uses of stimulants to re-create and sustain queer sexual sociabilities. He authored Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The queer politics of drugs (Duke University Press, 2009),The Gay Science: Intimate experiments with HIV (Routledge, 2018), Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water (MIT Press, 2015, with Hawkins and Potter); The Year’s Work in Showgirls Studies (Indiana University Press, 2024, co-edited with Melissa Hardie and Meaghan Morris). He is currently undertaking work on Undetectable: the molecularization of HIV stigma, his next book under contract with Duke University Press, which investigates the structural power of sexual stigmatisation as a factor in the intractability of the AIDS pandemic in certain regions of the world and how the organised global health response reductively conceives it to make it available for programmatic action. He is also undertaking collaborative work on the social and political life of elimination targets (ending AIDS by 2030) in Australia and globally as part of an ARC Discovery grant that commenced in 2025. His other main area of interest is comparative critical chemsex studies that explore and theorise the emergence and production of genres of sexual sociability among gay and other men who have sex with men and transgender and other women in different regions of the world and cultural settings.