Feminist sentimentalism? Ambivalent feeling in inclusive digital wedding media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article traces textual sentimentalism on popular, feminist wedding blog A Practical Wedding. In dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s work on sentimentalism as essentially apolitical and with feminist reclamations of the sentimental, it examines whether A Practical Wedding develops a feminist sentimentalism. Juxtaposing two of the blog’s foundational genres, the real wedding feature and the advice column, it excavates the blog’s invocations of the convivial, communal feeling that typically animates sentimentalism, setting them alongside an opposing archive of interpersonal boundary-making. Ultimately the blog epitomizes the ambivalence that some critics detect at the root of sentimentalism: A Practical Wedding’s real weddings hold up the wedding as a fantastical site of redemption, but this is countered by the unending return of political despair, frustration and rage in the advice columns. The result is a feminist sentimentalism as a specific offshoot of the moods of disappointment that pervade feminism.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".