Queer(ing) Suicide: Why Necropolitical Archives of Trauma and Resilience in AIDS Activism Matter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Numerous studies over the last decade have explored the high rates of suicide among queer men (Hottes, Ferlatte, & Gesink, 2015), queer women (Azra, 2022), and trans people (Veale et al., 2016), which are intensified for people of colour (Sutter & Perrin, 2016) and Indigenous people (Polonijo, 2022). For example, suicide is estimated to have surpassed AIDS-related illness as the leading cause of death of queer men in Canada (Hottes, Ferlatte, & Gesink, 2015). This dissertation explores queer archives of AIDS activist history to examine how intersectional direct action activism might be revived for contemporary queer suicide prevention activism. This work uses Mbembe’s (2003) theory of necropolitics, the power to confer premature death onto populations, to conceptualize suicide through a structural lens. Much of suicide prevention is done through individualized services such as suicide helplines. This work critiques neoliberalism in the queer suicide prevention initiative, the It Gets Better Project, as failing to relieve the traumatic conditions causing queer suicidality. This dissertation explores the challenges of the non-profit and charity sectors and discusses how social movements might draw on these sectors strategically, without getting subsumed into them. Combining existing individual approaches with a renewed emphasis on structural activism, this work uses trans studies scholar Dean Spade’s (2015) notion of trickle-up social justice praxis as a means of addressing the needs of the most marginalized suicidal queers first. This dissertation uses Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993), a means of drawing on a community’s strengths to ameliorating its challenges, to examine six areas in which queer livability might be enhanced: (1) familial homophobia and transphobia, (2) poverty, (3) healthcare, (4) education, (5) lateral violence, and (6) administrative violence. These areas are a launching point for future research that may explore each of the six areas more deeply and add other necropolitical areas impacting queer livability. This work ends with a discussion of the power of queer hope.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".