Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the Oscar-nominated, stop-motion animated film ParaNorman was released in August 2012, critics made much ado about the supporting character named Mitch: a dopey, beefy jock perceived to be the first openly gay character in a mainstream American children’s animated movie. As queer representation in children’s animated media continues to expand – as seen, for example, in Netflix’s 2021 film The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which features an openly queer protagonist – this article argues that Mitch’s now decade-old legacy is worth revisiting. Drawing on Noreen Giffney’s concept of the ‘New Queer Cartoon’, ParaNorman, I claim, marks a crucial turning point in children’s animated media. The film represents a collision between the latently and openly queer – it nods to the coded queer signifiers of past films while simultaneously making possible the gradual increase in visible queer representation that has taken place since its release.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".