Sexual health as self-determination:queer safer sex and the politics of policing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Montreal's radical queer scene espouses anti-state and anti-assimilation politics, offering a different approach than gay-rights movements seeking state recognition through legislative measures. Queer politics have a history of redefining and complicating norms, sexual and otherwise. As such, this thesis seeks to articulate how, in looking at safer-sex discourses in Montreal's queer community, we can imagine redefinitions of sexual 'health' and 'responsibility'. Situated in a critique of the ways in which public health operates as a tool of the state by surveying and controlling practices that violate normative sexuality, I argue this anti-assimilationist mode of sexual health challenges the 'norm' of health campaigning: that absence of infection is the epitome, entirety and ideal of sexual health. Rather, circulating discourses do not place 'safe' and 'unsafe' sex in opposition, and instead emphasize consent, accessibility, and the creation of safer spaces within which people can self-determine free from stigma, shame, and policing. Sensitive to the institutional roots of oppression, radical queers strive for solidarity to create environments conducive to autonomous choice, rather than declaring an individual need to assume the full burden of risk assessment and consequences. Using interviews, analysis of local artefacts such as zines and festival agendas, and fieldwork in queer spaces, this thesis seeks to explore some of the ways in which risk and safer sex are being (re)framed in contemporary queer communities in Montreal, Quebec. This research illuminates how any effective and respectful public health initiative requires a 'thick' description of a given community's discourses and practices around health. I offer related recommendations to sex-ed teachers in other communities, of particular importance in the wake of Quebec's 2003 sexual education reform.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".