Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the contradictory status of immaturity in our culture. While immaturity’s otherness to heteronormative adulthood is a source of fear and anxiety, this otherness is also what makes it desirable–that is, immaturity represents an escape from the pressures and standards of adulthood, signifying an oppositional subjectivity reminiscent of youthful rebellion. Indeed, the oppositional nature of immaturity is ultimately what gives it power as a source of political agency. Rather than seeing immaturity as something to be ashamed of, or as something to be avoided or defeated, this dissertation, following Judith/Jack Halberstam, views immaturity as a powerful form of resistance as well as a queer “way of being.” In fact, these two latter elements–resistance and queerness–go hand-in-hand; queerness within this project is primarily understood as an uncompromising “resistance to regimes of the normal,” specifically those pertaining to maturity and success. Beginning with a focus on male immaturity, I establish the fear/desire dynamic characterizing the immature male through close readings of the 1950s male-centered melodrama, combined with an historically-oriented analysis of postwar American culture. Next, I examine how comedy and dramedy films about childish men from the 1980s to the present day are also structured by this contradictory dynamic, as they both resist and reinforce heteronormative adulthood. My textual analysis of these films are grounded in theories of queer temporality. Finally, I focus on the female counterpart to the immature male, examining various constructions of female immaturity in recent cinema. Here, I utilize a broader range of queer temporal theories to demonstrate the political potential of immature womanhood, where “immature” gains agency through its queer and feminist resistance to the tyranny of heteronormative adulthood. While this dissertation ultimately seeks to demonstrate how immaturity functions as a site of resistance to (hetero)normativity, it also acknowledges how it can (specifically in the context of male homosociality), reinforce and reproduce oppressive structures, further underlining immaturity’s incongruous status.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".