Feminist Eventfulness, Boredom and the 1984 Canadian Leadership Debate on Women's Issues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study seeks to dispel the cultural amnesia surrounding a feminist-organized televised leadership debate on women's issues during Canada's 1984 federal election, by articulating a parallel history of the debate's creation and staging, one that foregrounds the concept of feminist eventfulness. I distinguish contemporary ideas about eventfulness from scripts of media spectacle by locating political eventfulness in the less glamorous, more tedious work of feminist organizing. Drawing on archival records, feminist historical accounts, and print news media coverage of the debate's planning and implementation, I examine the organizational strategies used by the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) to stage the 1984 federal leaders' debate on women's issues. The negotiations with the political parties over venue, audience constitution, media numbers and NAC's overriding determination to preserve the “publicness” of the debate demonstrate the ways the women's group approached a long-standing struggle facing feminist organizing within the mainstream: how to accommodate or manage the difference between staging a feminist media event as opposed to a normative media event. Contrary to mainstream media reports which characterized the debate as a “boring non-event,” I argue that NAC carried out the unprecedented appropriation and transformation of a “masculine” political ritual into a feminist media event that captured a larger audience share than that year's Stanley Cup ice hockey finals.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".