Performing Virtuosity: Queer Embodiment and Administrative Violence at the US–Canadian Border
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While attempting to cross through the US customs checkpoint in October 2012, Canadian transsexual performance artist Nina Arsenault was detained and interrogated by border security. In addition to being targeted as a transgender woman, Arsenault was also forced to prove her validity as an artist before she was allowed passage into the US, and was subsequently subjected to an intensive artistic evaluation. This article recounts the details of this previously undocumented incident, exposing the scenario as a vivid example of administrative violence precisely because the proscriptive methodologies used by border security refuse to acknowledge Arsenault’s queer form of embodiment. Incorporating extensive interviews in order to recreate the scene from Arsenault’s perspective, Gillespie shows how queer bodies are forced to repeatedly perform virtuosity as a survival tactic at the borders and blockages of normativity. Gillespie argues that in questioning the validity of Arsenault’s queer artistic work, the agents were also inherently questioning her validity as a productive citizen and positioning her as a deviant body.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".