Love, Simon and failure: Challenging normative discourses and femmephobia in gay youth representations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary and mainstream representations of gender and sexual minorities within pop culture provide an opportunity for marginalized narratives and stories to reach audiences otherwise excluded. As gay adolescent youth narratives become normalized within mainstream representations, ideas of coming out, the invisibilization of gay femininities, and the privileging of gender normativity within gay young adulthood percolate in film and media. This article presents an interpretive analysis of the regulation of femininity—femmephobia—within Love, Simon through depictions of Simon (the main gay adolescent character) and Ethan (Simon’s feminine gay peer). Using femme theory and “fag discourses,” this article problematizes femmephobic depictions of gay adolescence. Moreover, this article argues that Ethan's position as a “femme failure,” and thus an exemplar of femme resistance, offers opportunities for challenging femmephobic gender relations amongst gay adolescence in media and pop culture.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".