Critical femininities: a ‘new’ approach to gender theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical femininities examines femininity through a nuanced, multidimensional framework, moving beyond femininity as a patriarchal tool, to instead consider the historical, ideological, and intersectional underpinnings of femininity, particularly those that contribute to femmephobia. While Critical Femininities is often deemed an emergent area of scholarship, this framing is both paradoxical and, conceivably, inaccurate. Rather than being a nascent field, interdisciplinary scholars have contributed to Critical Femininities for over 60 years, whether or not they labeled their research as such. Arguably, Critical Femininities is a field whose emergence can be traced back to the second wave of feminism or even earlier. However, while Dahl (2012) notes that the question of “what is femininity” is as old as de Beauvoir’s (1949) Second Sex, there is a continued lack of scholarly endeavours not only in terms of how the question of femininity has been addressed, but also in terms of how this question is integrated within research. In this article we theorize why Critical Femininities has remained in a continuous state of emerging without recognition for its contributions as a field. We argue that the field’s stalled emergence can be explained by the tendency to view femininity as unidimensional, anti–intellectual, and infantile. Moreover, we see this stalled emergence as a product of the masculine epistemological centre that informs the very fabrics of society. In response, we aim to facilitate the continued growth of the field, and to make visible the taken–for–granted presence of masculinity that remains pervasive within gender theory and epistemological frameworks.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".