Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in "Closer" and "On the Prowl"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Analysis of two fan vids ("Closer" by Killa and T. Jonesy, and "On the Prowl" by Sisabet and Sweetestdrain) in the context of theories of vidding reveals that vids have a unique ability to combine analytic detachment and pleasurable investment. I analyze these two vids through Roland Barthes's provocative suggestion that reading criticism demands from the reader a perverse voyeurism of the critic's pleasure in the text to argue that they are examples of the ways in which many vids function as pleasurable criticism that invites viewers of such vids to enter voyeuristically into that pleasure. Both vids use tropes of sexual violence to characterize not only the mass media they respond to, but also the nature of fandom and of transformative fan readings. "On the Prowl" criticizes and celebrates the fan through constructing different audiences for a series of self-portraits; "Closer" does the same thing by constructing Spock as a portrait of the fan. The narratives of sadism and rape constructed by the vids both disturb and seduce the viewer, thus forming perverse texts that that problematize pleasure while simultaneously reinscribing it.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".