Performing Virtuosity: Queer Embodiment and Administrative Violence at the US–Canadian Border
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it