‘Within the limits of decency and modesty’: the construction of cis-heteronormativity in New Brunswick school dress code policies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study considers the ways school dress code policies in the Atlantic Canadian province of New Brunswick subtly perpetuate heteronormative and cisgendered assumptions regarding acceptable youth cultures. Although past media attention in the province has drawn attention to their indiscriminate enforcement, little is known on how these policies implicate queer and trans youth. Using critical discourse analysis, I collect and analyse data from 113 dress code policies across the region and examine how the language constructs norms about gender and sexuality. My findings reveal many policies using language which largely excludes the stylistic expression of queer and trans students: The texts nullify overall student sexuality and attempt to stabilise gender in ways that make sense to oppressive systems. I argue that my findings have broader appeal to other educational jurisdictions and can be applied to a wider set of discourses and practices around school dress code policies.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".