Navigating the boys’ club: Debra DiGiovanni and the performative strategy of comic self-deprecation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers Canadian comedian Debra DiGiovanni’s self-deprecatory humour as a performative strategy. In keeping with a performance tradition of self-deprecation as established by women like Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers, DiGiovanni offers ‘failure’ as a comic strategy. Her comedy is heavily reliant upon the framing of her lack in relationships, in self-control and in body image (in relation to normative gender standards and expectations). At the same time, however, DiGiovanni also engages critically with gendered expectations of heteronormative desirability, lampooning thin women, superficial men and celebrity culture. Although her comedy is generally characterized by self-deprecation, her humour also leaves space for an ambivalent politics of gender.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".