Sexual Projects, Sexual Formations, and the Muslim Phantasm: Unpacking the Global Gender Backlash
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay argues that Muslim sexuality provides a crucial foundation for a long-overdue postcolonial reckoning in sociology-one made urgent by the intensifying global backlash against feminist values. The global backlash mobilizes reactionary ideologies to distort gender into a terrifying phantasm that mobilizes contradictory yet effective meanings and feelings. To unpack the forces driving this phantasm, we turn to a parallel historical construct-the Muslim phantasm-which is similarly entangled with gender anxieties and offers a critical analytical resource. To this end, we propose two complementary frameworks: sexual projects and sexual formations. These frameworks are ideally suited for deconstructing these phantasms, mapping the affective and discursive landscapes that sustain them, identifying the actors who deploy them, and examining how others navigate their consequences. Applying these frameworks enables scholars to trace connections between local and global sexual formations, analyze Muslim resistance to reductionist representations, and understand how their sexual projects reshape broader sexual landscapes.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".