Chemical intimacy: A topological analysis of chemsex and harm reduction practices among gay and bisexual men in Taiwan

While public health and biomedical research have examined how intimate relationships shape chemsex among gay men, little attention has been paid to theorizing the content and limits of chemically mediated intimacy itself. Conventional understandings of intimacy emphasize affective ties that require time, commitment, and care in forging deeper connections. In the context of sexualized drug use, intimacy may emerge through alternative bodily encounters, communal care, and queer world-making organized through shared rituals, infrastructures, and affective labor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Taiwan, this article conceptualizes chemsex not as a discrete behavior but as an event-based process—a contingent series of negotiations, rituals, and bodily engagements shaped by digital infrastructures, biomedical discourse, and harm reduction services. Grounded in science and technology studies and critical drug studies, it advances a topological reading of chemical practices that moves beyond intimacy as affect or proxy to emphasize intimacy as event. It traces how bodies, substances, and sociotechnical conditions co-produce pleasure, care, and shared vulnerability across chemically mediated encounters. By juxtaposing “fun-gible” intimacy and therapeutic models of “dopamine management” as competing scripts of chemical intimacy, the study resituates intimacy as a performative process of emergence rather than a fixed outcome, thereby contributing to global debates on queer sexual health, affective governance, and the ethics of drug use and care.