Lisa Z. Sigel. Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lisa Z. Sigel's Making Modern Love is a fascinating contribution to the cultural and sexual history of twentieth-century Britain. It sets out to explore the “sexual stories” (p. 1) at the center of identity between the wars. Looking at a rich variety of sources—letters written to Marie Stopes after the publication of Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (1918); published correspondence in the raffish magazine London Life; and police cases involving cross-dressing, whipping, and obscenity—Sigel successfully achieves one of the principal aims of her book: to show how ordinary people (as opposed to sexologists, sex reformers, and writers) wielded agency in the articulation of sexual stories and in framing their own “sexual selves” (p. 3). In this way, Making Modern Love is concerned with the close links between popular culture and the formation not only of sexual subjectivity but, if the letters page of London Life is anything to go by, of sexual communities as well. One of the most important arguments Sigel makes is that for many people in interwar Britain, sexuality had come to be central to a sense of being modern—whether this involved successfully mastering mutual orgasm or exploring the many-splendored variants of fetishism. One of the most intriguing conclusions she comes to in this argument is that most ordinary people did not build their sexual selves or communities primarily from sexological sources; rather, these were often constructed from narratives and materials (in both senses of the term) found in consumer and popular culture. Not least important in this process was the “relationship between individuals and the groups they formed” (p. 179). Sigal's book offers a fascinating exploration of the shadowy space between people's private and public lives between the wars, a space often navigated anonymously or in disguise, as seen in the example of Frederick Holeman, a man who wrote obscene letters in the guise of a concerned mother.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.014 |
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".