Deviance and the Subversive Grotesque in Barbara Gowdy's <i>We So Seldom Look on Love</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines We So Seldom Look on Love, a short story collection by the Canadian author Barbara Gowdy who displays a strong interest in extreme forms of physical and mental deviance in relation to the act of looking. Discursive forms are analyzed that revolve around the tyranny of the normative gaze and the fear of deviance, the bounded bodily ideal as opposed to the body in pieces. Kaja Silverman's psychoanalytic theory of the field of vision in relation to deviant bodies throws light on these recurring issues in Gowdy's short stories. Additionally, contemporary theories of the grotesque inform the analysis of the Gothic‐Carnivalesque, a subversive strategy with which the author provokes our perception and classification of humans, identities, and sexes. The collection will be shown to culminate in the final story that contains a scene in which a female protagonist bestows “the productive look” (Silverman) upon her transsexual husband.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".