Beyond ‘Bug Chasing’ and ‘Gift Giving’: Reframing Sexualised Intentional Exposure to Infections through a Non-Pathologising and Non-Stigmatising Framework.

Early scholarship on bug chasing and gift giving has tended to focus narrowly on HIV and gay male populations, producing moralised, pathologising, and stigmatizing accounts. Such population-bound approaches obscure the broader social, structural, and contextual factors shaping sexual risk, and reinforce associations between sexual minority status and self-endangering behaviour. In this article, we revisit the classical literature on these phenomena, tracing how research has developed over time and highlighting enduring conceptual, ethical, and public health problems. In light of profound biomedical and social transformations—including antiretroviral therapy, treatment as prevention, and PrEP—earlier analyses risk becoming anachronistic, overlooking changes in both the epidemiology and meaning of HIV-related risk. To address these limitations, we propose the umbrella term Sexualised Intentional Exposure to Infections, a phenomenon-centred, pathogen-agnostic framework that recognises sexualised exposure as socially embedded, context-dependent, and ethically complex. This reconceptualisation supports more inclusive research, stigma-sensitive public health strategies, and evidence-informed policy responses to an underexplored dimension of sexual health.