Queering Whiteness: The Peculiar Case of the Women's National Basketball Association
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers an investigation of the Women's National Basketball Association's marketing discourses and provides historical and contemporary contexts to illuminate the complex articulations of race and sexuality imagined via representations of the league and its players. Proposing to “queer whiteness” by deploying particular inflections of the word queer, this article makes visible the ways in which discourses related to heterosexuality and whiteness assist marketers in advertising the league as a “mainstream” and therefore salable event. Marketers thus participate in and advance a representational politics that elevates the importance of maternity and morality as emblematic of the WNBA's idealized image of the “good girl,” especially the “good white girl.” This constant emphasis on the players' moral attributes and family values helps to distance the league from projections of alleged deviance imagined to be embodied by “fatal women”—that is, bodies marked as black and lesbian—the alleged obverse of the “good white girl.”
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".