Crossing the Gender Binary: Modelling Gendered Reference in Science Fiction and General Fiction

科幻小说被广泛认为在打破性别界限方面发挥了作用。本文探讨了这种观点在语言层面是否成立，即性别化指称在多大程度上容易被中性词或其他社会类别词所取代，以及这种现象是否将科幻小说与一般小说区分开来。

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.

研究通过在同一时期的科幻小说和一般小说语料库中掩盖“男人/男人们”、“女人/女人们”和“人/人们”等词汇，并根据性别对 RoBERTa 模型预测出的五个最可能的替代词进行分类。研究对五个重采样轮次进行了置换检验，以分析保留和置换情况，并对底层的句子进行了仔细研读。

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.

两个语料库都在两个方向上跨越了性别二元对立，但程度并不均衡：当“女人”被掩盖时，模型预测出男性词汇的频率大约是当“男人”被掩盖时预测出女性词汇频率的两倍。每一次不匹配都标志着一种统计学上的意外，即语料库中未预料到会出现该词。

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.

在这一共同模式的基础上，科幻小说表现出比一般小说语料库更高的性别渗透性，它在女性语境中放置“男人”的频率高于一般小说，而反向比例则保持稳定。其去性别化倾向也更强，将两种性别化词汇都向中性靠拢。

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.

在二元对立之外，被掩盖的“女人”也比被掩盖的“男人”更容易引出指代社会类别且不含性别的替代词。通过测量“男人”、“女人”和“人”在语言分布中的性别渗透性，并测试体裁是否会改变这种渗透性，本研究为科幻小说研究的主题论点提供了语言学证据，并为计算文学研究提供了一种可应用于其他类别词汇（如种族和阶级）的分析流程。