Post-Lesbian Tensions: A Qualitative Inquiry of Lesbian Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores how lesbians aged 18 to 25 negotiate their sexual identity in relation to post-lesbian discourse. Post-lesbian discourse refers to the postmodern conceptualisation of lesbian identity as irrelevant, unnecessary, and minor because of increased acceptance of homosexuality and the popularity of queer theory and its deconstruction of identity categories. In three small focus groups with a total of 10 participants, we explored the themes of word usage, meanings, and associations, as well as exclusion, boundaries, and stigma. We found that our participants’ disdain and discomfort with the word “lesbian” does not result, as post-lesbian discourse would suggest, from its irrelevance but rather due to the old yet persisting stigmas towards lesbian sexuality. To mitigate these stigmas, most of our participants use gender-neutral terms, most notably the word “gay,” to describe themselves. Using relevant literature, we contextualise the usage of gender-neutral terms and analyse their often-overlooked negative impact on female and lesbian visibility. Moreover, we found that while participants wished to avoid the exclusion and specificity of lesbian spaces, they desired these spaces all the same, which had a positive effect on their identity formation, confidence, and sense of community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".