Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taking Monsieur Vénus (1884) as its focus, this article expands upon the limited critical discourse connecting the work of Rachilde (1860-1953) to queer theory. Monsieur Vénus and queer theory are mutually illuminative: Butler’s theory of performativity allows us to interpret the unstable bodies in Rachilde’s text, while Monsieur Vénus in turn elucidates, or at least exemplifies, some of the questions at the heart of queer studies. For example: can sex exceed the human body? Can a transgender person live a heteronormative life? What is the relationship between queerness and reproduction? In asking such questions, this article grounds a piece of Decadent, fin-de-siècle French literature in the context of queer, feminist and trans studies, and thereby maps the connections between Rachilde’s work and these contemporary cultural conversations. As the author of Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe (1928), Rachilde rejected progressive social movements. I therefore borrow Lisa Downing’s notion of the ‘proto-queer’ (Downing, ‘Notes on Rachilde’ 16) to guard against the complete recuperation of Rachilde into the queer canon. Regardless of its author’s positionality, however, I am seeking to frame Monsieur Vénus as part of our queer literary heritage. Monsieur Vénus is more playful and provocative than it is political, but Rachilde succeeds in ‘scrambling’ sex and gender in that the two categories become muddled, unfixed and denaturalized.
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".