Accounting for the Unaccountable: Lesbianism and the History of Sexuality in Eighteenth‐Century Britain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract What is the history of sexuality a history of? This article provides an overview of scholarship in the field of 18th‐century studies and the history of sexuality, paying particular attention to the exemplary case of female same sex desire in order to explore the hermeneutical problems faced by this area of study. Unlike, for example, the history of women which has its object of study defined within its title, the history of sexuality is, in many ways, a history without a proper object. Is it a history of sexual practices such as prostitution, homosexuality or adultery? Is it a history of sexual identities like the sodomite, the sadist or the virgin? This essay argues that it is a history of ideas and ideologies surrounding sexuality’s discursive significance and reads how what we know about the past is grounded in our present cultural understandings of sexuality. Concentrating on the history of lesbianism and the emergence of a bourgeois discourse of heteronormativity in the 18th century, the article demonstrates how what we know about sex in the past is determined by who speaks, from where, and when.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".