New Technology, Same Old Stigma: An Analysis of Feminist Discourses and Sex Work Stigma in Sex Robot Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars have theorized the technological displacement of sex workers at the hands of sex robots, but none have addressed how sex robot representations could contribute to sex work stigma.Using critical discourse analysis and sex positive theories, this thesis seeks to address this gap by analyzing the production of knowledge in the emerging field of sex robots.Specifically, this study analyzes sex robot representations in academic literature and online news articles to critically consider how prevailing discourses may impact sex and gender norms and sex work stigma.My analysis revealed that through their construction as sex work, sex robot representations reproduce problematic sex and gender norms, radical feminist discourses, and stigmatize sex workers and sex work clients.Furthermore, sex workers, sex work clients, and sex robot/doll users were found to be underrepresented in these conversations.This research demonstrates the need for more inclusive and destigmatizing sex robot representations.
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 | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".