Queering the Middle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When imagined in relation to other regions in the United States, the Midwest is often positioned as the “norm,” the uncontested site of middle-class white American heteronormativity. This characterization of the Midwest has often prevailed in scholarship on sexual identity, practice, and culture, but a growing body of recent queer work on rural sexualities, transnational migration, regional identities, and working-class culture suggests the need to understand the Midwest otherwise. This special issue offers an opportunity to think with, through, and against the idea of region. Rather than reinforce the idea of the Midwest as a core that essentializes and naturalizes American cultural and ideological formations, these essays instead open up possibilities for dispelling and unraveling the idea of the heartland. Our introduction discusses the theoretical and critical motivations for understanding the middle as a queer vantage, along with an overview of the six articles that make up this special issue, which collectively reimagine routes and paths, contours and shapes, directions and teloses of queer lives, practices, and institutions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".