Raising the Hemline: Towards a Feminist Anthropology of Beauty Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper is an examination of feminist theory and its articulation with contemporary beauty practices and hyper-sexual forms of femininity. Using an ethnographic methodology and feminist understandings, it critiques former analyses—which often deny women agency and preclude their voices—and broadens the discussion by viewing beauty practices, forms of hyper-sexuality, and feminism from the perspectives of women involved in such conventions. Those interviewed included a pole dancer, a burlesque dancer, a makeup artist, and one of the co-founders of the Toronto SlutWalks. The diversity, and yet also similarity, of viewpoints offered is significant. These women utilize the language of 'control' to describe the benefits of their practices, noting the embodied and figurative sense of power they feel they achieve. Moreover, while feminist ideals are advocated, for the most part these women perceive an overall sense of isolation from the movement. In part this is because of the stringent anti-feminist backlash that has cast the movement in a negative light. In part, however, it is also because they feel their perspectives have been denied by feminism, and that it has in turn existed as another force patrolling their bodies.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| 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".