Gay in a ‘government town’: the settlement and regulation of gay-identified men in Ottawa, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This case study examines Ottawa, Canada, a ‘government town’, as both a destination for mobile gay men and a place where their conduct historically has been regulated by the government and military institutions located there. By placing the findings of 24 in-depth qualitative interviews with self-identified gay men in a Foucauldian governmentality framework, I argue that the government town is a powerful attractor for gay men in terms of economic opportunity and official prescriptions of nondiscrimination and acceptance, but is also a site where gay men and gay communities are regulated into certain modes of conduct. In particular, this article finds that Ottawa, as both a historic center of antigay activity and a more recent center of an LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) rights-seeking agenda in Canada, encourages practices that are based on discretion, gender normalization, and maintenance of the status quo. The article argues that these practices – with some notable exceptions – have led to a fragmented gay community characterized by economic and professional stratification, out-of-town consumption of gay culture, and a lack of recognizable social, political, and geographic focal points for gay men. It also posits that the mechanisms through which governmentality is leveraged are particularly central to the experiences of sexual minorities in places like Ottawa, where government institutions are especially dense or thick.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.053 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".