From ambivalence to acceptance: Representations of trans embodiment on American television
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Boasting some of the highest ratings in American cable television history, FX’s six-season dramatic series Nip/Tuck (2003–10) features more trans characters than any other show of its kind. Focusing on its regularly recurring trans woman character, Ava Moore, we argue that Nip/Tuck’s representations of trans embodiment are complex, contradictory and, above all, ambivalent. More specifically, we claim that the show portrays medically-assisted transition not only as a large-scale crisis in the order of things but also as a path to personal prosperity and success. In doing so, we demonstrate that the former is articulated through themes of incest, infertility, fraudulence and monstrosity while the latter is articulated through themes of beauty, intelligence, resilience and social mobility. Having presented our analysis of how Nip/Tuck represents sex reassignment and those who undergo it, we then turn to a critical consideration of how a more recent dramatic series, Orange is the New Black (2013–present), portrays the trans trajectory. Widely understood to represent a kind of ‘transgender tipping point’, Orange is the New Black can be seen as a useful index of how trans people are portrayed in present-day televisual culture. Through our consideration of these portrayals, we think critically about whether popular media representations of sex reassignment have changed since Nip/Tuck and, if so, in what ways.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 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".