“Other” Characters: The Gendering and Racialization of “Disability” Within Newbery Award-Winning Books, 1922-2012
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Disability rights activists have long urged recognition of the import of cultural representations and their salience in the Othering process. Previous research on children’s picture books and novels has noted that persons with disabilities are commonly depicted in stereotypic and dehumanizing ways. This article explores the extent to which stereotypes of disability may be gendered and/or racialized by examining children’s books that won the American Library Association’s Newbery Medal between 1922-2012. It notes that the crafting of female and male characters with disabilities within these books pays homage to traditional gender roles, images and symbols and, most notably, reiterates an active-masculine/passive-feminine dichotomization. In addition, these representations suggest how racial essentialism is implicated in the production of “disability” within children’s literature, with non-white “racial” identity equated with various forms of impairment.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".