Double Trouble: Gender Fluid Heroism in American Children’s Television
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Gender fluidity makes only rare appearances on North American television, and remains almost completely absent from programming for children. In contrast, transgender characters are making inroads into mainstream North American TV for adults. Still, media depictions of transgender people in the late 1990s and early 2000s have largely shown them as aberrations, having illegible and/or unstable identities, joining mainstream Euro North American society which tends to medicalize and pathologize transgender identities. Thus, too often the representation provided serves only to reinforce binaries by making the character exceptional and noting their unconventionality, or to highlight gender fluidity as a problem. Examining the animated streaming TV series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018–2020), we use scholarship on gender fluidity to critique the show’s representations of genders in addition to and beyond male and female. Looking at She-Ra through this lens, the show challenges assumptions about princesses, villains, helpers, and heroes. Ultimately transgressing traditional categories, the princesses and their allies, in their own distinct embodiments and self-presentations, use their differing magical and other skills to fight enemies in the Evil Horde to protect their planet, Etheria.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 it