She’s Such a Tease: The Feminine as Burlesque Performance in Margaret Atwood’s _The Edible Woman_
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper proposes that the dominant imageof Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman is that of the female as prey or commodity, and that this image can also be understood as the female as burlesque performer. As her marriage looms, Marian negotiates a complex set of social instructions on how to present herself as the ideal woman. This desired image involves strategic teasing and revealing for a male spectator: Marian’s appearance, as well as her behaviour, should be calculated to satisfy, but not sate, her male audience’s appetites. Lucy, Marian’s colleague, and Ainsley, Marian’s roommate, perform their own versions of femininity within what Judith Butler has since identified as “the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” The cake that Marian bakes in her own image, and then consumes, demonstrates her rejection of this compulsory, commodified bawdy role. However, she searches in vain for an alternative definition of femininity—one that did not yet exist when the novel was written in the early 1960s.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".