Abstract

This dissertation examines the lived experiences of people in Canada who have been criminalized due to allegedly not telling their sex partners that they were HIV-positive. Canada is known as a leading country in the world for punitively criminalizing alleged HIV non-disclosure, exposure, and transmission. This dissertation is the first known qualitative study to centrally focus on the lives of HIV-positive criminalized people and is based on 27 interviews with 16 different people from across Canada who have been charged, prosecuted or threatened with charges for alleged HIV non-disclosure. I mobilize a critical ethnographic approach, or what I call a criminology of the criminalized, one focused from the perspectives of criminalized people, that is grounded in the trajectories of critical social science and institutional ethnography. This approach to research becomes focused on denaturalizing the violence faced by criminalized people and calling attention towards forms of avoidable suffering that they face. When someone is criminalized, their legally safeguarded personhood is deconstituted under the law, they become socially and civilly dead, and can then become subject to forms of intense violence and surveillance. This is a life lived in a negative relation to the law. The outcome of this unique critical ethnography details how a complex intersecting array of legal tools (criminal laws and public health laws), as well as a range of institutions (police, public health, criminal justice, and the media) work to circumscribe the lives of the criminalized. People also come to be the subject of intense forms of violence by state institutions or various actors in their communities. This research moves beyond mere description and addresses the ethical function of such research to act as a form of bearing witness to these forms of violence, suffering, and surveillance faced by criminalized people. The results help render these experiences of violence unacceptable, acknowledging that society is open to change. This critical ethnography is one that seeks justice where no justice had been done, and contributes towards helping realize a life of flourishing for people subject to unjust forms of criminalization.