Sexual Subversives or Lonely Losers? Discourses of Resistance and Containment in Women's Use of Male Homoerotic Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Very little academic work to date has investigated women’s use of male homoerotic media (for notable exceptions, see Marks, 1996; McCutcheon & Bishop, 2015; Neville, 2015; Ramsay, 2017; Salmon & Symons, 2004). The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the potential role of male homoerotic media, including gay pornography, slash fiction, and Yaoi, in facilitating women’s sexual desire, fantasy, and subjectivity – and the ways in which this expansion is circumscribed by dominant discourses regulating women’s gendered and sexual subjectivities. The dissertation begins with a review of the existing scholarship on women, pornography, and male homoerotic media, followed by an in-depth analysis of online texts discussing women’s use of these media. The analysis explores what subject positions are (un)available to women who use these media. Using a Foucauldian, feminist poststructuralist discourse analytic framework, online editorial articles and internet forum discussions were explored using an immersion/crystallization approach, revealing three broad thematic queries posed by online interlocutors: a) whether women as a generalized category use male homoerotic media, b) establishing boundaries constructing and constraining a normative woman user, and c) interrogating why women are drawn to male homoeroticism. A variety of discourses were deployed pertaining to each of these themes, some of which served to align women’s use with dominant heterosexual, patriarchal, postfeminist, and neoliberal imperatives, while others subverted these imperatives and broadened the availability of sexual subjectivities for women. The tensions between these competing discourses mark male homoerotic media as a fertile site of resistance and expansion of sexual power and possibility for women.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".