“I was a 555-pound freak”: The Self, Freakery, and Sexuality in Celesta ‘Dolly Dimples’ Geyer’s Diet or Die1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyses former sideshow performer Celesta Geyer’s autobiography Diet or Die (1968). Despite her unusual employment in a freak show, Geyer’s autobiography fits the standard popular narrative of the disciplining of the fat body in order to achieve an idealized thin body. On the surface, the text reads as an absolute rejection of fat identity — a word that Geyer often associates with freakery. Yet, Geyer’s autobiography also shows how she became a subject through enfreakment, and it subtly reveals deep ambivalences regarding weight, sexuality and freakery. Part autobiography, part self-help manual, and part dieting advice manual, the text is a remarkably complex reflection of aspects of American culture and society in the early to mid twentieth century that has deep resonances in today’s fat phobic, dieting obsessed culture. Geyer’s autobiography also highlights the difficulties of reading and interpreting autobiographies as self-evident presentations of personal history and raises questions of how individuals tell their own stories.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".