‘I have loved being with you, Yaz’: Doctor Who, Thasmin and brilliant lesbian futures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Dead Lesbian Syndrome, part of the Bury Your Gays trope, is characterized by the death of lesbian and bisexual women characters, and it undermines a sense of lesbian futures. This article argues that although the relationship between the Thirteenth Doctor and Yasmin Khan (or ‘Thasmin’) in Doctor Who (2005–present) does end in the Doctor’s regeneration, it is not an example of the Dead Lesbian Syndrome. Drawing on the work of the Black studies scholar Katherine McKittrick, this article claims that the deliberately inclusive version of the show created around the Thirteenth Doctor depicts lesbian futurity through a combination of non-linear time and the erotic relationality of what Marilyn Farwell terms ‘lesbian narrative space’. It suggests that through this focus on relationality and multiple irreducible forms of temporality Thasmin becomes a different kind of story about women being together.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".