Contesting Knowledges: Formulating (Hetero)Sexual Bodies in the Terri-Jean Bedford Decision*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is part of a larger ethnographic project on citizenship and sexuality. More specifically, I demonstrate how the law ambivalently constructs sadomasochism as a sexual practice. I explore this ambivalent relationship through the disjunctions of legal discourse and how particular bodies are socially constructed through two court rulings in the Terri-Jean Bedford case. Terri-Jean Bedford is a dominatrix who was charged and convicted for keeping a common bawdy house in Thornhill Oust outside of Toronto) in October 1998. My analysis concentrates on how these rulings culturally construct knowledge about "other" sexual bodies so that eroticism is rigidly and uncritically understood in (hetero)sexual terms. I demonstrate how the rulings consistently return to a particular version of what "sexuality" means. Knowledge is never produced so simply, hence, Terri-Jean Bedford's complicity and participation in producing meaning(s) is included. In addition to the court rulings, there are short excerpts from Bedford's unpublished manuscript which explore the complexity of how knowledge is produced. Although there is a hegemonic Truth that resonates in legal discourse, I also include subjugated voices that contribute to their own subjugation. Thus, contested knowledges resonate in the place of a final "ruling" or politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".