Genderplay: Reclaiming and Reconfiguring Femininity through the Gendered Labor Practices of Transmasculine Sex Workers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the gendered labor of transmasculine sex workers as they navigate client requests for genderplay, an eroticized form of gender misrecognition. Drawing on in-depth interviews with transgender men and AFAB nonbinary sex workers, I conceptualize this specific form of gendered labor as reclaimed and reconfigured femininity, a skilled labor process that can produce unique pleasures and pains for this group of workers. Accomplishing reclaimed and reconfigured femininity requires negotiating the demands, anxieties, and erotic needs of clients, which can come into conflict with their identities as transmasculine people. Despite the potential costs of such investments of emotional labor, I find that this process can become a subversive practice of self-exploration and gender-making, as well as a source of pleasure for the workers themselves. The gendered consequences of paid genderplay are more complicated and even contradictory than they first appear. Although the process of reconfigured and reclaimed femininity described here is, in many ways, unique to sex work or to transmasculine experiences of work, it also offers fresh insight for sociological analysis of gender, labor, and pleasure.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 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 it