The (Step)motherly Ideal: The Role of Sex, Gender and Stereotype in the Aurore Gagnon Murder Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the portrayal of Anne-Marie Houde in the media and her treatment by the criminal justice system in Quebec in the early twentieth century in the murder trial of her stepchild, ten-year-old Aurore Gagnon. Specifically, it argues that issues of sex, traditional gender roles, and the wicked stepmother stereotype played a role in her guilty conviction and harsh sentence, since other murderesses in this period were, quite literally, getting away with murder. By murdering her stepchild, Houde placed herself outside of the category of woman and denied herself the chivalrous treatment of the court. This is especially true since, as a stepmother, she faced immediate prejudice by the court and media. Furthermore, Houde manipulated her motherly role in a malicious fashion to contrive Aurore’s misbehaviour. In doing so, she exploited the perceived burden of these motherly duties to defame and arbitrarily punish Aurore.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".