Living in a negative relation to the law: legal violence and the lives of people criminally charged due to HIV in Canada
My dissertation examined the lives of people living with HIV who were charged or prosecuted in relation to not disclosing their HIV-positive status. I applied a critical feminist sociological ethnographic inquiry, using interviews (16 people from 5 different provinces), archival research, and observation to examine the material impacts of being criminalized from the perspective of people who had been targeted simultaneously by criminal and public health laws. Notably, recruitment of this diverse population was complex and relied on ensuring rigorous confidentiality protocols. Many had been incarcerated for long periods of time on charges of aggravated sexual assault, were registered as sex offenders, or were in the midst of active criminal proceedings. I garnered a very rich data set that empirically details how people's lives are organized in relation to the criminal justice system and institutions of public health.
Listen to the qualitative experiences of people who were criminally charged and prosecuted in relation to alleged HIV non-disclosure in Canada who were part of my dissertation research. This video was created by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network based on my research outcomes.
Focusing on the violence of criminalization disarticulated criminalized people’s treatment from the common narratives of guilt, innocence, and redemption, put forth as justifications for violence. Instead this research turned toward the material and the role of punishment in society. Due to being charged with a criminal sanction usually reserved for the most violent non-consensual actual sexual assaults, combined public health law sanctions, and with being HIV-positive, the people I spoke with were confronted with intensified forms of punishment, violence and discrimination. The material outcomes of criminalization extended out beyond formal institutional punishments into a broad range of populist forms of violent retribution, social marginalization, and discrimination. Any legal protections entitled to persons, were no longer available for people in the study, as they came to live a life of negative personhood, one of social and civil death.
See articles featuring my emerging dissertation research by Le Devoir, DailyXtra, Now Magazine, the HIV Justice Network and Concordia University's The Link newspaper!
