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Record W2085239832 · doi:10.1093/jahist/jas017

Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical

2012· article· en· W2085239832 on OpenAlexaff
Marlis Schweitzer

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of American History · 2012
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTheater, Performance, and Music History
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMusicalSingingPeriod (music)Representation (politics)Human sexualityIdeologyPoliticsArtGender studiesHistorySociologyAestheticsLiteratureVisual artsLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Stacy Wolf’s Changed for Good is a carefully researched, elegantly written, and methodologically innovative feminist analysis of Broadway musicals from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. Where Wolf’s previous monograph, A Problem like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002), focused specifically on the careers and performances of four celebrated Broadway stars from the 1950s and early 1960s, Changed for Good emphasizes how musicals have contributed to, and in some cases even provoked, discussions about the role of women in American society over a sixty-year period. As Wolf explains, Changed for Good looks at and listens to the different ways that women actors and female characters interact with all aspects of the performance, from singing together in duets to dancing alone center stage, from participating in a community’s formation to becoming a cog in the theatrical machinery. (p. 6) Each chapter examines a small cluster of musicals from a single decade that together reflect major changes in the social, political, and cultural representation of women. Rather than discuss all aspects of the performance in every chapter, Wolf wisely builds her chapters around the analysis of a single musical convention. So, for example, in the first chapter, “The 1950s: ‘Marry the Man Today,’” Wolf looks at three different examples of female duets from Guys and Dolls (1950), Wonderful Town (1953), and West Side Story (1957) to suggest that the aural and visual effects created by two women singing together onstage may have undermined the otherwise dominant heterosexual/sexist ideology that characterized most musicals of the period. Later, in “The 1980s: ‘The Phantom of the Opera Is There inside My Mind,’” Wolf brilliantly demonstrates how the emphasis on huge scenic effects in megamusicals such as Les Miserables (1985) and Phantom of the Opera (1986) literally and figuratively diminished the female body onstage, a scenographic effect that she sees as another example of the 1980s backlash against the advances of 1970s feminism.

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.015
Threshold uncertainty score0.054

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0150.023
Scholarly communication0.0070.008
Open science0.0010.006
Research integrity0.0030.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.216
Teacher spread0.177 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations102
Published2012
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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