Crossing the Gender Binary: Modelling Gendered Reference in Science Fiction and General Fiction
Science fiction is widely credited with unsettling gender. This article asks whether that holds at the linguistic level, in how readily gendered reference gives way to its counterpart, a neutral term, or other social category, and whether it separates the genre from general fiction. It does so by masking man/men, woman/women, and person/people across same-period science fiction and general fiction corpora and classifying RoBERTa's five likeliest substitutes by gender. Retention and displacement are permutation-tested over five resampling rounds, and the underlying sentences are read closely. Both corpora cross the gender binary in both directions, but unequally: where woman is masked, the...
| Authors | Yuxuan Liu, Haim Dubossarsky, Ruth Ahnert |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 15 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.