Limited intimacy: barebacking and the imaginary
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers recent scholarly attention placed on the notion of risk-taking with respect to HIV/AIDS and the sexual culture of gay men. The rejection of condom use during anal sex, or ‘barebacking’, has in recent years been an important discursive site for theorising the tension between fantasy and reality. Debates about the degree to which barebacking is a ‘real’ sociological threat or simply a sensationalist narrative that reinforces the pathologisation of gay men has occurred alongside debates as to whether a lack of condoms (especially in pornography) signifies a woeful disregard for the realities of sexual life or the basis of a realist genre depicting more intense and authentic sexual interactions. Using a Lacanian framework for considering the subjective tension between experience and representation, I contend that those debates are limited to the same degree that they position fantasy and reality as discrete opposites. It is only where the language that substantiates the empirical and the subjective begins to break down that barebacking as a phenomenon can be said to exist at all.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 it