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 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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 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".