HIV risk and sense of community: French gay male discourses on barebacking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyses the use of the concept of 'barebacking' as a risk category in the discourses of French gay men. It discusses how the rise and spread of the term barebacking contributes to reframing gay men's personal experiences of HIV prevention and their sense of belonging (or a lack thereof) to a gay community. The study is based on 30 qualitative interviews with French gay men conducted between 2005 and 2008. An import from the USA, the term barebacking emerged publicly in France in the late-1990s and was first used to describe intentionally unprotected sexual practices. Debates surrounding this risk category were marked by violent controversy over its use and its definition among HIV prevention actors. There remains a general lack of consensus on the definition of the term, despite its use by activists, in porn culture and in the daily discourses of gay men. By focusing on the relational roots of risk perception, I consider how uses of the term barebacking invoke a moral framework around risk taking.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".