The Affective Enforcement of Heterosexism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper I undertake to describe and theorize an important way in which subjects are kept “in line” with heteronormativity at the level of embodied affectivity. To do this, I synthesize a phenomenological understanding of sexuality with contemporary work in philosophy of emotion to thematize a form of self-doubt that is felt in relation to the experience of queer desires. I argue that the elicitation of such feelings of self-doubt is a crucial way in which a wider affective milieu of heterosexism is unjustly enforced. To achieve these aims, I first conceptualize heterosexism as an affective milieu, meaning a sociocultural system with prescribed “feeling rules.” Section 2 then draws on phenomenological discussions of sexuality to show how (erotic) desire is an existentially significant aspect of our affective lives. I then develop an account of self-doubt, in section 3, as something felt, self-alienating, and self-involving. Finally in sections 4 and 5, through examples drawn from autofictional literature and film, I parse out two forms of self-doubt and the unjust harms they incur. First, self-doubt as an existential background feeling. Second, episodic self-doubt which is enacted to regulate the salience, legitimacy, or self-importance of a particular affective experience.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".