Bibliographic record
Abstract
While lesbian, bisexual and queer women characters and storylines have increased significantly in the last decade, fans are often left with tragedy and trauma as their legacy. The term “bury your gays” has been around for decades and refers to the killing of LGBTQ+ characters (usually lesbian or bisexual women) often because they are queer or to advance the story of a cis, straight (usually male) character. Recently a new trope “cancel your gays” has emerged due to new streaming platforms’ business models, which sees shows with queer characters and storylines being cancelled after one or two seasons, again reinforcing audiences’ feelings that queer people are not entitled to endings (let alone happy ones). These tropes are known by most LGBTIQA+ people and some screen studies academics, but not many non-LGBTIQA+ people know of its existence, its history, and its damaging impact on LGBTIQA+ audiences. These issues are explored through this online interactive documentary, Queer Representation Matters (2023). Users can explore the interactive documentary through different pathways including a historical timeline including interviews with academics and creative practitioners that illustrates how these issues and themes have evolved over the last 100 years, and exploring the All Our Lesbians Are Dead! theatrical play that was the catalyst for this work. This project links scholarly theory and creative practice to bring discussions of media representation from the academy into the public sphere in an accessible way. It demonstrates the capacity of participatory digital media to inform and educate a wider audience on important issues of media representation. This project’s objectives included: to provide an historical account of the “bury your gays trope” historical accounts and key moments of queer screen representation; to provide a creative exploration of the effects and impact of trope on LGBTIQA+ people through first-hand accounts from academics and creatives, and; to demonstrate the lasting and damaging impact that the “bury your gays” trope has had on the LGBTIQA+ community, in the hopes of limiting its use in future. This project is guided by theoretical perspectives from the following areas of scholarship: media representation (Millward, Dodd & Fabara-Manuel 2017), digital media (De Kosnik 2012; Hands 2011; Yang 2016), fan studies (Baird Stribling 2013; Ballinger 2014; Guerrero-Pico, Establés & Ventura 2018); and queer fandom (Ng 2017; Ng & Russo 2017; Bridges 2016; 2018; Monaghan 2016). It bases much of its application of interactive documentary practice on Aston and Gaudenzi (2012), Nash (2012), Donald & Galloway (2013) and Aston (2016). The documentary was produced using qualitative research methodologies including semi-structured interviews with screen practitioners (writers and producers) working on LGBTIQA+ themed work, as well as academics researching in the fields of LGBTIQA+ media representation. This project used a digital production design method focused on user-centred design (UCD), emphasising a human-centred design approach which involves user testing at each stage of the project lifecycle.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".