The Poetic Life Narratives of Midlife and Older Bisexual Adults: Struggle, Survival, and Healing in Three Acts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract While empirical discourses surrounding bisexuality and aging often focus on challenges, stigmas, and disparities, analyses of bisexual coping and survival offer potential counternarratives of hope and possibility. The purpose of this analysis is to narrate stories of coping and survival among midlife and older bisexual individuals in the context of their life course experiences. Findings are presented in a series of three found poems, or poems created from the direct quotes of study participants, which are followed by interpretations of the quotes in the broader context of participants’ lives. Each poem depicts a particular “act” of life, breaking up the narratives into three distinct stages of meaning-making. Act I: The Struggle captures early- to midlife experiences fraught with a sense of confusion, lack of belonging, mental health challenges, and interpersonal conflict. In Act II: Coping and Survival Looks Like…participants reflect on the personal strengths, skills, and relationships that allowed them to move through their most significant challenges. Act III: Healing Bisexual Futures, presents reflections on what bisexuality means to the participants at this stage of their lives and how they envision and dream of their own futures. We see this streamlined narration of an often complex and messy life history as an agentive story-telling process in which bisexual individuals seek meaning, direction, and cohesion in the telling of their life experiences. Creative research methodologies are particularly well-suited to capturing the narrative and lyrical nuance in such stories, as well as their emotional poignance.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".