Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sex trade clients have become a contested identity in academia and mainstream media. Some construct clients as exploitative and inherently deviant, while others destigmatize them as complex and varied. Regardless of one’s position, almost all of the discourse is authored by non-clients (or those who do not identify as clients). Chester Brown’s Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John marks an autobiographical intervention into the literature. In this 2011 Canadian memoir, Brown chronicles his journey from being a monogamous boyfriend to becoming a client of multiple sex workers. This article uses Paying For It to situate Brown, and sex trade clients in general, as queer subjects in their rejection of relational normativity and engagement with criminalized consensual sexuality. Part I surveys the changing construction of sex trade clients from ordinary to deviant men, and reviews scholarship that reads sex work as queer activity. Part II begins by analyzing comics as a genre teeming with queerness. It then queers Brown by considering both aesthetic choices and depicted life episodes, with a focus on his rejection of romantic labor, and fostering of alternative kinship arrangements.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 |
| 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".