Female Effigies and Performances of Desire: A Consideration of Identity Performance in Lars and the Real Girl.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The female sex doll allows for the projection of uninhibited sexual fantasy and is animated through that fantasy in the mind of her partner. In this way, she can be seen to function as a performative effigy of desire, maintaining heteronormative male sexuality by reflecting a patriarchal ideal of female physicality and objectification while simultaneously demanding a responsive performance of heterosexual masculinity. In the film Lars and the Real Girl, the relationship between the female sex doll and her male partner is shifted into the public sphere, and Lars projects a social, rather than sexual, identity onto Bianca, the sex doll object of his desire. The social identity constructed by Lars reflects his desire for a non-sexual, community-oriented, and ultimately subservient female partner, and the widespread acceptance of this model of femininity by the community is evidenced through the performative interactions that occur between Bianca and those around her. Because the sex doll exists in a potentially deviant category of sexual interaction, the community’s refusal to treat her as an object, but rather as a living subject, reflects the power of performance in the construction and maintenance of social identity. The very fact of Bianca’s object status allows her to take on complex sexual and social fantasy-roles, all of which prove to be problematic, but which ultimately allow for the maintenance of male sexual and social authority.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".