The unbecoming subject of sex: Performativity, interpellation, and the politics of queer theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper elaborates a theory of ‘unbecoming’ to explore how a queering of the subject might transform oppressive social conditions. In this analysis of the subject’s deconstructive relation to the law I take up the interpellation scenario forwarded by Louis Althusser and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to argue that being ‘unbecoming’ potentially not only alters subjectivity, it also alters the very law that hails the subject into being. First, I deconstruct both subject and law in their relation to each other as performatives, for it is at this threshold of undecidability that the possibilities for political transformation emerge. Second, I demonstrate the creative and transformative political force of queer performativity to show that our agency as political beings lies not merely in affirmative representations of identity. Political agency also emerges in the creative force of a becoming that is also an unbecoming, where in and through our abjection from the social order we critique and transform it.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.080 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".