Rituals of intimate legal touch: regulating the end-of-game handshake in pandemic culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article situates recent attempts to regulate the end-of-game handshake in youth team sports within a broader context of the troubling of touch within pandemic culture. It suggests that the end-of-game handshake is most productively understood as simultaneously: embodied ritual, form of intimate touch, and legal gesture. The analysis invites readers not only to understand the handshake as a complex and meaningful quotidian ritual, but also to see it as an increasingly unstable mode of handwork. The end-of-game handshake, in particular, highlights the clash of values between sport’s imperative to re-establish the normative hetero-masculine haptic order between players at the conclusion of the match, and pandemic culture’s framing of the skin of the palms as dirty and its corresponding requirement, asked of all prudent subjects, that we hygienically manage our everyday haptic contact. In this way, the contested fate of the end-of-game handshake in pandemic culture highlights the multiple ways that touch is understood as a volatile practice demanding regulation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".