‘My Mind on Paper’: Anne Lister and the Construction of Lesbian Identity
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anne Lister (1791–1840) of Shibden Hall near Halifax, kept a diary for 34 years. It eventually extended to over four million words, in 27 quarto volumes, about a sixth of which are in code. In this chapter I argue that Lister’s coded diary was an important tool in the construction of her sexual identity. By providing her with a safely enclosed textual space, it gave her the ability to assert a desire for women that offers a challenge both to the alleged absence of discourse on female homosexual experience and identity in the early part of the nineteenth century, and to the categorization of intimate relations between women of this period by the asexual term, ‘romantic friendship’. Lillian Faderman notes that the eighteenth-century fashion for romantic friendship ‘dictated that women may fall in love with each other, although they must not engage in genital sex’ (Faderman, 1981: 74). She concludes that ‘most love relationships between women during previous eras … were less physical than they are in our times’ (19). However, Lister’s explicit documentation of her sexual activity provides a refreshing alternative to what Terry Castle calls ‘the lugubrious myths of lesbian asexuality’ embodied by the idea of romantic friendship (Castle, 1993: 106). The conceptual possibility of physical relations between women has been problematized as much by the historical suppression of female sexuality in general, as by epistemological concerns; as Martha Vicinus warns, lesbian history consists largely of ‘nuances, masks, secrecy, and the unspoken’ (Vicinus, 1996: 235).
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it