Sexuality and the ethics of body modification: Theorizing the situated relationships among gender, sexuality and the body
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing from our qualitative, in-depth interviews of 35 professionals who write referral letters for “gender transition,” we explore how practitioners’ decisions to approve, delay or refuse access to body modifications speak to the centrality of normative concepts of sexuality and the social function of bodies in the cultural politics of gender identity. We argue that practitioners construct what we call an ethic of body modification that tends toward reducing the body to its symbolic function—as a representation of the subject’s true gender and a basis for sexual identity. We also discuss the views of a minority of practitioners who resist this tendency by creating an alternative path for body modification independent from identity claims. We conclude by discussing the cultural/political implications of pseudo-scientific discourses that assume gender identity is natural, stable and universal, whereas bodies are flexible and malleable social representations.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.087 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".