Governing sexuality and park space: acts of regulation in Vancouver, BC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper suggests that the coding and ordering of sexuality and space through definitions of which sexual practices and which representations of sexuality are morally appropriate in public space can be usefully understood as a problem of governance. We argue that attempts to hide or make visible specific sexualities in public space are complicated and politically charged because, while written regulations are relatively cut-and-dried, their implementation, by planners, judges, et al., involves significant discretion and leads to contingent, contestable outcomes. Furthermore, the politics of governing sexual morality and public space is made more problematic when the place where a hegemonic norm of behaviour or morality is publically challenged is an iconic park that attracts intense media attention. The paper elaborates these arguments through two interrelated case studies: a debate over the appropriate location of an AIDS memorial in Stanley Park, Vancouver and the reaction to the killing of a gay man who cruised the park for sex. We conclude by linking our argument to recent statements about the future of geographies of sexuality, arguing for analyses that acknowledge both the contingences and potentialities of categories like ‘the state,’ ‘governance,’ and ‘public space’ and also their structural tendencies and their ongoing association with sexual repression.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| 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".