“But Suppose I Did Want a Boy?” Homosexual Economies in Herman Melville’s <i>The Confidence-Man</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article is centred on chapter twenty-two of The Confidence-Man, the chapter in which the con man, in the guise of Philosophical Intelligence Officer, tries to sell a boy to Pitch, the misanthropic Missouri bachelor who has used up some thirty boys on his backwoods farm and now wants to replace boys with machines. Structured as an epistolary dialogue between the two authors, the article explores the complex ways Melville’s novel positions its readers and the desires they bring to the text. Can the long debate in chapter twenty-two about buying boys be read as a transaction between a pimp and a pederast? Do other homosocial encounters in the novel encode homosexuality and thus reinforce our perception of it in chapter twenty-two? The authors argue for a queer reading of The Confidence-Man and in the process foreground their own sexual identities and reading practices.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".