Gamble, Joseph. Sex Lives: Intimate Infrastructures in Early Modernity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The act of sex, or the "daily making-do of sex" (5), along with the physical logistics of sex, which Gamble describes and interprets in detail in this book, has long been considered one of cultural history's most intriguing topics because sexual acts are not transparent.In this book, the act of sex includes, broadly, heterosexual and same-sex scenarios, as well as autoeroticism.It is also a paramount topic because the sexual act permeates "a life tout court" (7).A plethora of literary and non-literary texts reveal new evidence about how early modern people engaged in sexual acts, what the "physical logistics of sex" (73) looked like, and how they wrote and fantasized about their erotic lives.Sex Lives illuminates the material and emotional foundations of early modern sexual activities, situations, and conditions under which sex took place, and it uncovers the early modern fascination, even obsession, with sex, including teaching how to do sex."Sex life" (5) is the term Gamble employs-helpfully chosen for its brevity and clarity-to denote a range of experiences that early modern people had regarding sex: learning how to engage in it, perfecting their knowledge and practice of it, lubricating in the service of pleasure, preparing for sex, reflecting upon sex (or on not having it), and understanding how sexual acts were influenced by racial boundaries.A theory of sex life emerges from these physical and intimate activities, as well as from the affective agency covered under the useful rubric of "sexual infrastructure" (3).The book argues and amply documents that "sex lives are embodied […] all the way down to the level of genital size and comportment" (73).The book is organized into two parts, each consisting of two chapters, and includes an "interlude" that examines the phenomenology of sex and affective attachments.The concept of sexual anticipation-describing the feelings in the body at different moments before and after the sexual act-is novel and uncovered astutely, particularly given how difficult it is to reconstruct such feelings from the past.To retrieve this sexual past, Gamble interprets a seventeenth-century ballad, the dialogic erotica The School of Venus, and the play The Dutch Courtesan.One of the most fascinating critical and readerly moments in this book is the philological estimation of the relative, fluid, if
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".