MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2341583031 · doi:10.1353/wfs.2001.0000

Poignant Relations by James Smith Allen (review)

2001· article· en· W2341583031 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Margot Miller

Bibliographic record

VenueWomen in French studies · 2001
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGender Studies in Language
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFeminization (sociology)HumanitiesPhilosophyGloryArtLiteratureGender studiesSociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Book Reviews27 1 vants, ils font exister les choses" (26)].Through these many sources, Larivière combats the false notion that only a few militant feminists from Quebec find linguistic feminization compelling. Specifically, the book responds to eight arguments. Most of them come from men, and mostly French men—particularly "'ces messieurs' de l'Académie" (112)—whom Larivière charges with a "messianic" attitude toward the language. However, she acknowledges the opposition of certain women, either because they feel powerless or because they enjoy reflected glory from their husbands' power, which the wives consider threatened by feminization. Larivière proceeds upon the following premise: "La langue a tout ce qu'il faut, grammaticalement parlant, pour féminiser les noms. . . " (30). Two ofher topics will serve as examples: 1) The use ofthe masculine as both specific and generic leaves a gaping hole in the language, obscures women's role, and can lead to absurdities of the following type: "L'homme est un mammifère; il allaite ses petits" (46; quoted from Thérèse Moreau, Le Langage n 'estpas neutre, 1991). T) The use ofthe masculine as a neuter can lead to syntactic impossibility, such as, "Le professeur Dupont est enceinte et il souffre constamment des nausées" (57). Larivière concludes that the arguments against feminization come from individuals lacking in linguistic knowledge, or derive from obvious "mauvaise foi," or perhaps a simple "bonne vieille misogynie camouflée" (117). She cites the outcry of"ex-garde des Sceaux français" Jacques Toubon on hearing "les droits de la personne," instead of "les droits de l'homme": "ce n'est pas du français" (46). Larivière would side with celebrated French linguist, Claude Hagège: ". . . les Français ne sont que les dépositaires, non les propriétaires exclusifs, du français" (Ross Steele, Susan St. Onge, Ronald St. Onge, La Civilisationfrançaise en évolution II, 1997: 342). Larivière's solution: one must "se faire l'oreille" (99). For Larivière, language, as a "produit social," (22) must evolve to reflect changing social realities. Women, in their new responsibilities, must become visible, audible—named. In a previous work, published electronically in 2000, Larivière has treated the how of the issue (Comment en finir avec la féminisation linguistique ou les mots pour la dire: www.00h00.com). Here, she has answered, so that no doubt remains, the question why. Now, if we could only find a way to get some of the "messianic" Cro-Magnons to read her book! Annabelle M. ReaOccidental College James Smith Allen. Poignant Relations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 270 Pages. ISBN: 0-8018-6204-3. $42.50 new ($17.50 used on amazon.com) Poignant Relations details the lives and writings ofthree unknown nineteenth -century French women: Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie, Geneviève Breton-Vaudroyer, and Céline Renooz-Muro. These women's discourses are 272Women in French Studies mixed (autobiography, diary, letters, novels, literary criticism and theoretical work in the sciences), and, Allen tells his readers, their lives are as paradoxically constituted by their writing and their refusal of"feminism" as their texts are at once subversively destabilizing and intended to create conscious selves. Allen suggests that their combination ofgenres offers concrete strategies for dealing with conflicting loyalties and interests that anticipate the more recent "discovery" ofwomen's style as mixed and relational. Allen's title ispolysémique: it implies both a sense oítouch and an indication of sensitivity. At the same time, it evokes stories related, and relayed, as well as the connections among the women and those close to them. He situates the women historically, socially, and culturally and sees them as educated individuals whose writing includes them in a level of French society that would otherwise have denied them any influence in public affairs. Allen links his subjects to contemporary feminist discourse through his discussion ofthe women writing themselves into agency, and through the notion of"the self-in-creation [that is] more important than the genre it assumes" (39). He further suggests that their form ofmixed-genre autobiography is best approached through the work of such theorists as Sheri Benstock and Shoshona Felman and the...

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.371
Threshold uncertainty score0.559

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.347
Teacher spread0.313 · 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 teacher head, not a consensus.

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

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

Citations0
Published2001
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueWomen in French studiesSame topicGender Studies in LanguageFrench-language works237,207