Fellas, Is It Ace to Not Get the Girl?: Asexual and Aromantic readings of fantastical coming of age in George MacDonald’s “Phantastes” and J. M. Barrie’s “Peter and Wendy” (“Peter Pan”)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores aromanticism and asexuality in fantasy by doing asexual and aromantic readings of Phantastes by George MacDonald and Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie. By looking for asexual resonances in these texts this thesis argues that these coming-of-age fantasy novels imagine non-reproductive futurisms that embrace asexual erotics. I argue that the coming of age of both the main male characters is queer. When Anodos wakes up in the real world his spirit has developed in the spiral fashion that MacDonald imagined models internal growth rather than in a strictly linear and chrononormative fashion. In Peter and Wendy, Peter’s asexuality and aromanticism can exist and thrive in Neverland, but he cannot grow up in the real world because reality will not let him grow into his asexuality and aromanticism. Instead, it is Wendy who grows up, comes of age, marries, and has children. Rather than solely imagining reproductive futures sustained by the beginning of a new generation, both novels imagine productive futurisms that do not prescribe heterosexual reproduction or romance. In terms of fantasy’s potential asexual and aromantic resonances this thesis finds that the fairy tale influence is where the potential of a eucatastrophe and healing not involving marriage comes from, which facilitates the exploration of asexual erotics as central parts of these final stages of the fantasy narrative. It argues that that it is contemporary Victorian and Edwardian sexuality and gender norms that impose the restrictions of the asexual and aromantic resonances present in the texts.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".