”You do it for the good times”: rival feminist readings of torture and kink in <i>Grand Theft Auto V</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The inclusion of a graphic, interactive torture mission in the video game Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) attracted considerable criticism. I conduct a close reading the infamous torture mission, using two analytical archetypes: the feminist killjoy and the kinky brat. First, embodying the feminist killjoy, I argue that the torture mission in GTA V is a performance of power that naturalizes American imperialism and constructs Muslim bodies as sexually deviant and thus deserving of torture. Second, embodying the kinky brat, I argue that a kink-based analysis moves us away from understanding the mission as only a power fantasy. It helps reveal players’ vulnerability to the bodies at play, explore the messy and contingent affects that play produces, and unpack taken-for-granted assumptions about this controversial mission. This analysis is purposefully ambivalent. Following Sedgwick, I argue that each archetype knows some things about the mission well, and some things poorly. However, both the feminist killjoy and the kinky brat refute the claim that violent play is “just a game,” pointing instead to the interconnection between play and “real life.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".