Original Article Managed Not Missing: Young Women’s Discourses of Sexual Desire Within a Postfeminist Heterosexual Marketplace
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our article describes findings from a project exploring sexual agency and desire among young women, focusing on the negotiation of sexuality within relationship contexts. Adopting a social constructionist framework, we used discourse analysis to examine semi-structured, audio-taped interviews with 39 Canadian young women (aged 18–26). Three related interpretive repertoires were identified, namely, (a) Sex as Relationship Hygiene (i.e., beneficial to the health of one’s relationship), (b) Sex as Exercise-esque (i.e., part of a wellness regime), and (c) Sex as Economy Exchange (i.e., a commodifiable practice within the heterosexual marketplace). Desire was not absent from participants ’ accounts, however, it was channeled into specific forms of sexual expression and mediated by multiple and competing cultural imperatives. The interpretive repertoires provided spaces for agentic sex within which subjective sexual desire was not the primary motive but rather was subordinate to a rheto-ric of self- and relationship improvement as a key register of sexuality. We discuss these findings in the context of postfeminist directives about sexual desirability and proficiency that young women must traverse as they develop ideas about successful female sexuality within heterosexual relationships.
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".