Abusing, resisting, claiming power in the works of Quebec women playwrights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The number of boldly innovative plays by Quebec women playwrights, published and performed professionally since the mid-twentieth century, runs to well over one hundred. Their themes and approaches to making theatre vary widely, as did those of pioneers Anne Hbert and Franoise Loranger. An important strand, particularly evident during the 1970s and 1980s when le thtre au fminin was strong, is the ostension and debunking of social practices deriving from dominant ideologies legitimating and even encouraging the abuse of power. These plays frequently dramatize the negative impact of such abuse on individuals' internalized sense of identity, self-worth, and legitimacy of place, and respond to the abuse with a wide spectrum of inventive theatrical techniques, as individual characters come to a realization of what is being done to them. In more recent decades, women playwrights have continued to show urgent concern about the abuse of power in social relations and institutions, but have usually set aside explicitly feminist thematics, although the complexity of motherdaughter relations and the stereotypes surrounding motherhood continue to preoccupy them. These playwrights stress the importance of imagination, fantasy, words, images and artistic creation as they boldly explore new ways of making theatre and representing society. Frequently postmodern, their plays usually remain open and ambiguous, leaving audiences and readers free to plunge for themselves into the unending and myriad flow of conflicting processes and never to become ensconced in the sort of static situation cultural norms often construct for women. Despite such fresh and creative vision that could promise new departures, however, many of the plays in this corpus continue to develop dramatic conflict around characters' inability to move beyond the contradictory imperatives of motherdaughter relations, frank enjoyment of their own sexuality and full use of the tools of language and agency available to them. Appropriate modes for the expression of women's erotic energy and the exercise of power are still seen to be elusive on Quebec stages.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".