The Drayang Girls of Thimphu: sexual network formation, transactional sex and emerging modernities in Bhutan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bhutan's sustained low HIV prevalence can be attributed to its political commitment to maintain isolation from foreign cultural influence. Recently, rising HIV prevalence has coincided with the increase in human traffic along Bhutan's borders. The majority of infections, occurring primarily through sexual contact, have appeared in the urban environments that are situated along the main transport routes. This qualitative study explored the sexual networks that form at entertainment venues in the capital city of Thimphu. To more fully understand sexual network formation at theses venues, one must take into account an emerging modernity that reflects a convergence of cultural, economic and political influences emanating from Bhutan's unique 'middle-path' modernisation scheme. The growing appearance of transactional sex in Thimphu not only points to an emergent form of exploitation wrought by larger economic transformations and widening social inequalities; the power inequalities that surround its practice are also significantly exacerbated by the local cultural politics and moral ideologies that arise as Bhutan proceeds along the path towards global capitalism. Discourses of Bhutanese sexual morality articulate with broader political economic transformations to forcefully position village women engaging in transactional sex within a field of power relations that leaves them open to various forms of subjugation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".