The Birth Control Pill: Popular Discourse and Personal Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis demonstrates the transformation of the birth control pill from a contraceptive technology to a lifestyle drug by comparing its historical origins to contemporary iterations and attendant issues.Drawing from biomedicalization theory, I suggest that contraception is one of many areas of life that have become subject to medical intervention, and use the pill to illustrate how contemporary health is characterized by a shifting landscape of privatization and commodification, new sources of information and knowledge, and an emphasis on optimization of the body.First, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of popular media texts related to the birth control pill in order to highlight problematic themes that characterize dialogue surrounding the pill.Secondly, these issues were compared with the results that emerged from a series of interviews with women who have taken the pill.Through exploring both the public and private realms, I argue that the pill is an agent of both biomedicalization and of gender performativity, and articulate the ways that this important pharmaceutical development enforces hegemonic standards of femininity.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".