The Lightness of Being ‘‘Gaie’’: Discursive Constructions of Gender and Sexuality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article, we explore the narratives of 14 young Francophone women from Montreal (Quebec, Canada) competing in team sports and identifying as ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual ’ or refusing labels altogether. We seek to gain a better understanding of these young women’s discursive con-structions of gender and sexuality as well as of their performative acts in sport and in other milieus. We submitted their narratives to a thematic analysis which was followed by a critical discourse analysis inspired by poststructuralism. Our findings suggest that the participants generally positioned themselves as ‘gaie ’ (as opposed to lesbian or queer), which seems specific to Quebec. By emphasiz-ing the lightness of being gaie in sport, the participants relied on an alternative discourse that tends to be positive towards gaie sexuality. Moreover, by constructing gaie sexuality as a more ‘feminine’, less visible and consequently less disturbing version of lesbian sexuality, these sportswomen also articu-lated dominant discourses that reproduce lesbo/butch-phobic ideas. We also show the participants’ unstable and changing subjectivity as we highlight the contradictions in their discursive constructions of gender and sexuality. Key words • discourse • gender • lesbian • poststructuralism • sexuality • women In the 1990s, studies focusing on issues of sexuality in female athletes were
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".