Suffer the Children: National Crisis, Affective Collectivity, and the Sexualized Child
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article takes up the explicit and implicit political deployment of children in relation to two recent enactments of childhood innocence and vulnerability: Dateline NBC's wildly popular series, To Catch a Predator, where men who think they are meeting an underage child for sex are caught on camera, exposed, and arrested; and the phenomenon of Purity Balls, a growing practice within fundamentalist Christian communities, in which a daughter pledges her virginity to her father during a yearly father-daughter formal ball. The article situates these particular examples within the political and ideological utilization of children that has been increasingly apparent within the American political landscape in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. It also draws on the theoretical work by Lee Edelman, Lauren Berlant, and Peter Coviello in order to explore the political and cultural implications of the way that the trope of childhood vulnerability circulates to reiterate a particular kind of heteronormative, patriarchal social imaginary, what Edelman identifies as reproductive futurism, and to anticipate the constitutive effects of vicarious trauma for imagining the nation.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".