1970s transvestite taxonomies and the new queer frontier
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to Kadji Amin, vernacular discourses in recent years have “exploded Butler’s heterosexual matrix in a way hitherto unimaginable” (2023: 91–2). Yet neither queer nor transvernacular taxonomies are new, and the separation of sex, gender and sexuality has been a contested topic among trans subcultures since at least the 1950s. Combining original archival research with feminist, queer and trans philosophes of gender, this paper argues that, despite being almost entirely unhistoricized, the identity category of “transvestite” represented one of the most highly organized, internally differentiated, and intellectually significant identity formations of the 20th century. We can learn a lot about possible futures for queer studies by turning our attention to the recent past and the untheorized archive of 1970s trans community print culture is full of lists of the constantly evolving identity categories available for members of these early trans communities. From the 1960s onward, united through mailing lists and a burgeoning periodical culture, a complex ecosystem of transvestite subcultures emerged throughout the Anglosphere. Trans people used correspondence, newsletters and magazines, to connect across nations and continents. Through these formats, they discursively constructed how to understand transness, queering prevailing understandings of sex, gender and sexuality. Examining the impulses behind and effects of these complex categorical formations historicizes and enriches understandings of the ambivalence of trans taxonomies today.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it