Playful Chilling: Mapping Queer Sociality and Spaces of Play in Chengdu, China
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
This thesis seeks to understand how spaces of leisure and narratives of playfulness have embodied potent possibilities for queer sociality in China over the past two decades.In exploring the formation of queer scenes in Chengdu, I seek to demonstrate that the proliferation of queer worlds, at the ephemeral moment of their becoming and inhabiting, suggests a force and attitude as it saturates and complements the rather slow social imaginaries and rhythms of Chengdu as a city.By interrogating what constitutes the motion of the city and queer worlding, urban knowledge and altercation, public textualities, and mediums, I posit that rather than focusing on the notion of normal that hinges upon reproductive futurity, moments and encounters in queer worlding are indicative of a freeze on time that moves and whirls the world around.Observing these moments in which queer sociality and the ephemeral cues of affection took place, it is imperative to rethink the generative force play brings and what we can learn from being playful in relation to a creation of the world in which we live or would want to live.My analytic framework is anchored by an affective register, which merges John Paul Ricco's theorization of a temporal genre called neutral affect with what Kathleen Stewart calls "public feeling in constant motion" in everyday life.This thesis concretizes these concepts with Wei Wei's scholarship on The Production and Transformation of Queer Spaces in Contemporary Chengdu, China, and my (auto)ethnographic work and intervention on urban microhistory in Chengdu.I examine these sites as my objects of study to contextualize how the intensity of affective capacities relates to the production of counterpublics, intra-urban networks, and geographical movement in the city.Yuan 11 Let me return to my home town entombed in grass as in a warm and high sea.Lasciatemi tornare nella mia citt natale, Sepolta nell'erba come in un mare caldo e alto.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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