Silence that matters: HIV Nondisclosure and the limits of Consent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the legal and sociocultural linguistic implications of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R. v. Cuerrier (1998) where it was ruled that the nondisclosure of HIV-positive status could vitiate otherwise freely given consent, resulting in the sexual act being deemed aggravated assault or aggravated sexual assault. Specifically, I am interested in how the logic of HIV nondisclosure law is deeply interwoven with heteronormative assumptions about sexuality and how consent is negotiated in practice. To interrogate the often-unstated assumptions underlying the Court’s decision, I examine how the legal imperative to speak about one’s HIV status is resolved within gay sexual spaces (where consent is customarily negotiated wordlessly). My goal, in doing this, is to identify how these competing imperatives (i.e., the legal obligation to speak and a custom of staying silent) are resolved within cultural and linguistic practice. \n \nIn this study, I use autoethnography, semi-structured interviews, and legal analysis to examine the legal and political implications of the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure. My findings suggest that existing approaches to HIV nondisclosure in criminal law are insufficiently attentive to how regulatory apparatuses, including social norms, shape the interpretation of sexual practices. This often results in courts confounding sexual diversity with sexual violence, which continues a long-held tradition of criminalizing sexual minorities. Guided by these insights, my legal analysis challenges the logic of HIV nondisclosure law more directly. Specifically, I argue that privileging putatively “rational” faculties, like autonomy, in the regulation of sexualities fails to adequately capture the complexities embodied in sex and negotiations of sexual consent. As an alternative, I offer a new model—what I call bodily subjectivity—to more fully capture the visceral harm enacted by acts of sexual assault.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.088 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".