The Gender of Lying: Feminist Perspectives on the Non-Disclosure of HIV Status
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Arguing from a feminist perspective, this article contends that non-disclosure of HIV status to one’s sexual partner should not vitiate consent to sexual activity. In R v Cuerrier, [1998] 2 SCR 371, the Supreme Court of Canada held that non-disclosure of HIV seropositivity to a sexual partner constituted fraud that vitiated consent to the sexual contact when there was a significant risk of bodily harm. The application of Cuerrier in the past 13 years has highlighted the uncertainty created by this test, especially in the face of our increasing medical understanding of HIV transmission. Signalling a pervasive discomfort with Cuerrier, on 8 February 2012, the SCC was called on to reconsider Cuerrier in appeals from R v Mabior, 2010 MBCA 93, and R v DC, 2010 QCCA 2289. Feminist perspectives were notably absent from the submissions of the parties and the many interveners before the SCC, and indeed, it is difficult to map out a single feminist position on the issue. On the one hand, the ground-breaking principle in R v Ewanchuk, [1999] 1 SCR 330, emphasizes the primacy of subjective consent. On the other hand, HIV discrimination and stigma disproportionately impacts disadvantaged groups including aboriginal and new immigrant women. Furthermore, women in relationships of unequal power, such as sex workers and battered spouses, may not be able to safely disclose their seropositivity. In this article, we consider the gendered effect of lying, and how HIV status intersects with the power imbalance at the root of sexual assault. We discuss the tension between the need for women to protect both their medical information and their sexual integrity. Finally, we consider specific contexts in which non-disclosure arises, including bathhouses, marginalized ethnic communities, and prostitution, and the role of stigma in preventing disclosure.
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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 | 0.023 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.104 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| 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".