[Submitted on 13 Oct 2026]
Title:Crossing the Gender Binary: Modelling Gendered Reference in Science Fiction and General Fiction
View a PDF of the paper titled Crossing the Gender Binary: Modelling Gendered Reference in Science Fiction and General Fiction, by Yuxuan Liu and 2 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract: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 model predicts a masculine term about twice as often as it predicts a feminine term where man is masked. Each mismatch marks a statistical surprise, a word the corpus did not expect there. Against this shared pattern, science fiction shows greater gender permeability than the general fiction corpus, placing man in feminine contexts more often than general fiction while the reverse rate holds steady. Its degendering tendency is stronger too, drawing both gendered terms toward the neutral. Beyond the binary, a masked woman also draws substitutes naming a social category and no gender far more often than a masked man does. In measuring the gender permeability of man, woman, and person in linguistic distribution and testing whether genre changes it, the study gives science fiction studies linguistic evidence for thematic claims and computational literary studies a pipeline applicable to other category vocabularies, such as race and class.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.19028 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2610.19028v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.19028
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Yuxuan Liu [view email] [v1] Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:20:57 UTC (1,257 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled Crossing the Gender Binary: Modelling Gendered Reference in Science Fiction and General Fiction, by Yuxuan Liu and 2 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
TeX Source
view license
Additional Features
Audio Summary
Current browse context:
cs.CL
new | recent | 2026-10
Change to browse by:
cs
References & Citations
NASA ADS
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)