To be Black in this Skin: Anti-Black Racism and How Heterosexual Black Men Engage with HIV Vulnerability in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Toronto is home to Canadas largest and fastest growing Black population and it is also the probable epicenter of the Black HIV epidemic in the nation. While the HIV response in Ontario recognizes African, Caribbean, and Black people as a priority population, HIV in Canada has historically been thought of as an epidemic among gay white men, thereby impacting the preconceptions of service providers and the manner by which services are targeted and administered today. \n\nBased on 26 months of fieldwork in Toronto, this dissertation ethnographically explores how HIV-negative and HIV-positive heterosexual Black men navigate HIV-related stigma and anti-Black racism. Three key questions ground this project: 1) What does it mean to be straight, Black, and male in a world predicated on anti-Blackness?; 2) How do we philosophically conceptualize contradictory forms of resistance and agency in the lives of Black menparticularly those living with HIV?; and 3) How do enduring modalities of racial slavery structure how Black folks experience HIV?\n\nIn analyzing how Black subjects come into being or, more precisely, struggle to be realized, I critically reflect on the writings of Afro-pessimist and Afro-optimist thinkers. In doing so, I expand on the concept of fugitivitythe notion that Black life represents a ceaseless act of ontological disobedience (Moten 2008). Fugitivity is employed as a productive lens to understand straight Black mens attitudes about their own vulnerability to HIV, and the different ways they engage with socially imposed forms of subjectivity. I conclude that although Black mens sexual acts and choices exist within anti-Black systems predicated on their negation, they are not passive objects of racial oppression. Rather, I argue that when Black men engage with the limitations of Black life it can produce remarkable acts of creativity, vitality, and affirmation.\n\nThis dissertation contributes to a theory of Black subjectivity that upholds the idea of racial slavery as the basis of Black ontological production. My research seeks to expand anthropological discussions on Blackness and being, the anthropology of HIV, and broader social scientific inquiry on HIV critiquing responses that privilege behavioral change over structural determinants.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".