Twice Slain: Female Sex-Trade Workers and Suicide in British Columbia, 1870-1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1870 and 1920, the voluntary deaths of 13 British Columbian women, identified by coroners and jurors as prostitutes, provoked a response out of all proportion to their numbers. This essay examines this response, focusing first on the narratives created by witnesses at the coroner's inquest on the body, and then on the interpretations of those who did not literally "know" the dead woman. I argue that the bodies of the dead can be read as a text which invoke multiple interpretations and meanings. Running through all the narratives is a discourse of respectability which shifted attention from an examination of the body and morals of one women to that of society as a whole. Those who knew the women read the death in ways that emphasized their own and the deceased's personal connection to the community in which they lived. Coroners, jurors, and the press inscribed their fears of sexual disorder and racial miscegenation upon the bodies of the dead. Through examining and responding to the deaths, the women and men involved in the inquest process helped create and bolster a particular moral and social identity which utilized the prostitute as a metaphor of social evil. When the body of the prostitute no longer evoked this response, prostitutes' deaths were excluded from the inquest process.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".