‘The curiosity with which that fist moves’: Lesbian erotics in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lesbian neo-Victorian novels such as Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music feature representations of lesbian erotics that are engaged in contemporary discourses of desire in opposition to Victorian pornographic assumptions that pathologize the lesbian subject. Because neo-Victorian cultural production according to Heilmann and Llewellyn engages with reinterpreting and rediscovering the Vicorians, lesbian authors return to that period in order to interrogate where and how lesbian desire might manifest and how that desire can be implicitly converted into a subversive form of power. Waters and Donoghue represent lesbian sexual connection through erotically charged consumption and sadomasochistic consummation represented by moments of lesbian vaginal fisting in an effort to usurp traditional and overdetermined heterosexist ideas of lesbian erotics. Consumption/consummation reinvest the lesbian with erotic power in the neo-Victorian novel.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".