‘You’re standing on my neck’: Feminist cynicism and queer anti sociality in MTV’s Daria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract ‘Look right through me / Say I’m gloomy / Yea, so sue me [...] I’ve got to be direct / It’s like a big train wreck / You’re standing on my neck / You’re standing on my neck,’ sing post-grunge band Splendora, throughout the opening sequence to MTV’s popular 1990s cartoon series, Daria. Brooding, sarcastic, and surly, Daria Morgendorffer – a teenager and unapologetic misanthrope from the small, fictional town of Lawndale – has much to offer scholars of feminist negativity and queer anti-social theory. Following Lee Edelman’s rejection of a communitarian, heteronormative ‘politics of hope,’ this article seeks to theorize Daria as an important feminist killjoy and queer cynic; one who vehemently disavows the liberal humanist and capitalist-driven narratives of heroism, optimism, femininity and success that so often saturate teenage television programming. Lauding negativity’s ability to ‘poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary thinking’, as Jack Halberstam writes, this article is interested in the kinds of alternative imaginings that are produced by one’s refusal to ‘grow up’ and to ‘fit in’.
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.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".