Tom Waugh, <i>Hard to Imagine</i> , and porn studies: a dossier of critical reflections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For the anniversary of Porn Studies we are critically engaging with foundational figures in our discipline area, and in this collection of reflections we focus on Canadian film theorist and activist Tom Waugh. Waugh sits alongside a generation of activists and thinkers ranging from Vito Russo and Leo Bersani to Richard Dyer who traced the contours of what was to become the study of gay male culture and identity. We present a diversity of perspectives here as a way into reckoning with Waugh’s seminal text Hard to Imagine and why Waugh’s interventions matter for porn studies. We consider the affective encounters of scholarship and how the routes through a field are shaped by them. Peter Rehberg thinks about the relationship between Waugh’s writing about sex and the development of queer theory during the 1990s. Finally, Conal McStravick traces his own route through the field of porn studies via his doctoral research into the artist, curator, and activist Stuart Marshall (1948–1993), who was a contemporary of Waugh’s, and the resonances between their work.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".