Review of Vicarious Kinks: S/M in the Socio-Legal Imaginary, by Ummni Khan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canvassing an array of texts — from recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions to Fifty Shades of Grey — Ummni Khan’s Vicarious Kinks: S/M in the Socio-Legal Imaginary aims to get to the bottom of representations of sadomasochism (s/m) in law and culture. While resisting singular definitions, practitioners of s/m tend to describe it as “appropriating social hierarchies, restaging power imbalances, and/or re-signifying pain within a consensual context.” Rather than analyzing the practice of s/m itself, however, Khan is interested in the discursive production of s/m in three key cultural sites: the psychiatric profession, the feminist sex wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and mainstream cinematic representations. After pulling apart the multiple and competing understandings of s/m in these sites, Khan directs her gaze at judicial decisions, carefully reading the Supreme Court of Canada’s pornography jurisprudence, a trilogy of cases from the United Kingdom involving consensual s/m activities, and a series of Canadian cases in areas including criminal law, family law, and human rights law.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".