The Traffic in Affect: Marietta Holley, Suffrage, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Popular Humour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After calling for a major re-theorization of the relations in mass culture between humour, the politics of affect, and the stereotype, I engage these relations through a case study of the articulation of women's rights with the traffic in affect. The argument focuses on late-nineteenth-century U.S. writer Marietta Holley to tell the story of the production and circulation of stereotypes in the context of women's suffrage. Holley's stereotypes have traditionally been derided as crude or lauded as complex reversals of sexist ideology, but the differences in these judgements only underscore the sense in which her work has too often a modernist aesthetic critique that relies too much on "value" and that cannot account for the cultural work of the literary outside the regime of quality and complexity. In focusing on the cultural work of Holley's popular stereotypes in relation to print culture, the humour industry, and suffrage, this paper extends Margaret Finnegan's important analysis of the points of intersection between women's suffrage and consumer culture to include the connections between humour, politics, and the economic traffic in affect, connections that still characterize political activism and consumer culture in the twenty-first century. Après avoir signalé l'opportunité d'une re-théorisation importante des liens qui existent dans la culture de masse entre l'humour, la politique des affects et les stéréotypes, j'analyse ces liens par le biais d'une étude de cas portant sur l'articulation des droits des femmes en termes d'affects. Le raisonnement est centré sur l'écrivaine américaine Marietta Holley (fin du dix-neuvième siècle), et raconte la production et la circulation des stéréotypes dans le contexte du suffrage féminin. Traditionnellement, les stéréotypes de Holley ont été ridiculisés comme simplistes ou encore glorifiés comme un renversement complexe de l'idéologie sexiste, mais ces différences de jugements ne font que souligner la façon dont son oeuvre a toujours été soumise à une critique esthétique moderniste trop centrée sur les « valeurs » et incapable de rendre compte du travail culturel de la littéraire en dehors des critères de qualité et de complexité. En centrant son analyse sur l'oeuvre culturelle que constituent les stéréotypes populaires de Holley en relation avec la culture journalistique, l'industrie de l'humour et le suffrage, cet article augmente la portée de l'analyse que fait Margaret Finnegan des points d'intersection entre le suffrage féminin et la culture consumériste, de façon à inclure les liens qui unissent l'humour, la politique et l'échange économique en termes d'af-fects, liens qui caractérisent encore aujourd'hui l'activisme politique et la culture consumériste.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".