David A.B. MurrayFlaming Souls: Homosexuality, Homophobia and Social Change in Barbados. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. x + 144 pp. (Paper US$22.95)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
David Murray'sFlaming Souls: Homosexuality, Homophobia and Social Change in Barbados, which examines contemporary Bajan gender and sexual identities through interviews, participant observation, and media analysis, joins a growing literature on queer Caribbean life.Organized into nine short chapters (including the introduction and conclusion), it attempts to provide a complex rendering of Bajan gay life attentive to the historical, social, economic, and political factors that contribute to what he claims is an inverted reflection of North American queer activism and communities-the relative invisibility of gays and lesbians and the relative acceptance and visibility of transgender people.Murray's project is not interested in lesbians nor does it explore the similarities between queer people of color living in North America and queen and gay Bajans.Instead it focuses on the differences between Barbadian and "Euro-American" conceptions of gender and sexuality.However, in his precise, albeit narrow, definition of "gay" as a gender normative sexual orientation in "Euro-American" culture, Murray fails to include discussion of the way such a definition was consolidated in a post-Stonewall era of queer political realignment in the United States.The first half of Flaming Souls takes up key discursive modalities that produce and circulate the concept of the homosexual in Barbados and its diaspora.Whether in an analysis of Barbadian "feedback media" (Chapter 1), HIV/AIDS policy and governmental initiatives (Chapter 2), or the circulation of human and sexual rights discourses in everyday conversations and newspapers (Chapter 3), Murray carefully explores how the rights and risks of homosexuality inflect public debates about Barbadian national citizenship.He maintains that antigay sentiments aired in the press should not be read as indicative of national homophobia; rather, those who express these views "are unhappy with the current socioeconomic situation and strive to return to a mythic past of a communal, heterosexual, and homogenous Christian nation" (p.27).In other words, homosexuality has acquired an emblematic status in public discourse, representing contemporary social instability and national immorality.The balance of the text focuses on the lives of queens (transgender and gender nonconforming individuals) and gay men in Barbados in an effort to compensate for "a paucity of research on the lived effects of negative public representations of the homosexual" (p.54).Chapter 4 hinges on the story of Edward (a pseudonym), a bed-and-breakfast owner who publicizes his business through publications geared toward gay European and American tourists.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.006 |
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".