Undressing masculinity: An exploratory study on men’s embodied engagement with underwear
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article shares findings from an exploratory study on the relationship between men’s embodied engagement with underwear and their practices of masculinity. Drawing on wardrobe interviews with nine men and object analyses of their underwear, we investigate how men understand the role of underwear in their lives, how they shift their underwear choices in different social contexts and how they experience their bodies through underwear. Our participants developed emotional bonds with their underwear, but their engagements with these items were restricted by gendered social pressures and boundaries. We argue that men use underwear as ‘manhood acts’ to provide themselves with comfort and confidence to navigate everyday life and, ultimately, shore up and affirm hegemonic masculinity. This article contributes to men’s fashion scholarship on underwear by introducing the context of everyday dress practices to the existing focus on branding and advertising images. We encourage researchers to build upon our study on men’s underwear by engaging participants whose demographics expand beyond our sample of primarily heterosexual, cisgender men who were under 35 years of age.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".