1,720,958 research outputs found
Online ‘barebacking’ community and the creation of ‘sex pig’ identities: Exploring affordances of a Web forum in celebrating sexual excess
No full textThe Internet and HIV biomedical technologies are considered as significant technological advances underpinning “barebacking”, or condom-less anal sex among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM). Online chatrooms, discussion boards, and geosocial networking applications (“apps”) are regarded as having facilitated new opportunities to meet and connect with other barebackers. Virtual spaces enabled the proliferation of online discourses specific to barebacking, such as “bugchasing” and “giftgiving” to refer to the intentional spreading of HIV. While previous research focus on the metaphors used by bugchasers and giftgivers online, such studies lack analyses of other barebacking practices and identities beyond intentional seroconversion. This paper seeks to fill this gap by examining the affordances of a barebacking online community I call “Pigpen” in offering space for MSM to discuss various topics apart from intentional seroconversion: in particular, the emergence of “sex pigging”. Analyzing online forum discussions, I argue that Pigpen opens possibilities for reimagining sex pigging desires, identities, and practices that are intertwined and constituted by HIV prevention discourses and biomedical technologies. While sex pigging is associated with sexual excess, I demonstrate that limitless sex is practiced in a variety of ways: ranging from the eroticization of HIV and other STIs, to avoiding transmission by adapting some harm reduction strategies. Some sex pigs reappropriate the association of pigs with revulsion and taboo by reframing sexual excess as pleasurable and productive of feelings of freedom. By contrast, other sex pigs renegotiate risk and safety by incorporating risk minimization, giving rise to the possibility of “safer sex pigs”. Thus, sex pigging desires, identities, and practices are more complex than previously thought because they do not neatly fall into the category of irrationality and irresponsibility
From Condoms to Antiretrovirals: A Posthumanist Performative Account of Men Who Have Sex with Men’s (MSM) Condomless Sexual Practices
No full textRecent biomedical advances in the field of HIV prevention and treatment, including Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) and Treatment as Prevention (TasP), have shifted meanings of "risk" and "safety" concerning gay and other men who have sex with men's (MSM) sexual practices, particularly around "barebacking" or condomless sex. However, public health research continues to be based on the paradigm that gay men misbehave and misuse technologies such as PrEP and TasP to engage in barebacking. Public health discourses frame MSM as culpable for the effects of HIV technologies, reinforcing dominant (neoliberal) narratives of individual autonomy and risk behaviour. The purpose of this thesis is to challenge these assumptions. By mobilising analytic frameworks from posthumanist performative theories emphasising the active, dynamic, and agentic nature of material and discursive forces, I consider how advances in HIV prevention actively participate in shaping MSM's sexual practices and culture. I examine the impacts of HIV biomedical knowledge and technologies on MSM's conceptualisations of sexual risk, responsibility, morality, and stigma. Drawing on MSM's accounts from online forum posts and in-depth qualitative interviews on the effects of PrEP and TasP, I argue that gay men creatively incorporate harm reduction measures, including biomedical technologies, into their sexual practices, engendering possibilities for condomless sex to become "safer," empowering, and more pleasurable. This study destabilises the conception of condomless sex as always "risky" and "intentional" by recognising that barebacking practices emerge as complex and multiple—simultaneously safe/unsafe, premeditated/unplanned, and rational/irrational. This work enriches social science's contributions to HIV research by developing a theorised account of the complex considerations taken by gay men in assessing risk through the incorporation of HIV knowledge and biotechnologies. I also contribute to a conceptual rethinking of agency and responsibility beyond human subjects in the materialisation of condomless sexual practices, acknowledging the implication of human and nonhuman forces, including HIV science and public health, in producing a wide variety of effects associated with HIV treatment and prevention technologies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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