Pushing Boundaries and Exploring Limits: Ami McKay’s The Birth House as (Hys)torical Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter examines the structural and political devices of postmodern historiographic metafiction and the use of humorous fiction about childbirth as a counter-historical practice. I argue that while The Birth House operates as a form of historical fiction, author Ami McKay’s primary goal is to draw attention to Euro-Canadian notions of morality and the so-called medically sound infallibility of science through representations of the grotesque. What type of book is The Birth House and how does it fit in to Canadian literary tradition? I propose that The Birth House provides a space in which McKay uses binary oppositions to argue for the promotion of midwifery, holistic birthing, and the reclamation of the feminist body through mothering. Through historical fiction, McKay unpacks historic discourse by suggesting that the inscription of a woman, a midwife no less, into turn of the twentieth century narrative disrupts the national myths of medical and scientific progress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".