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Record W2462587012 · doi:10.1057/9781137016768_6

“A Wanted Man”: Transgender as Outlaw in Elizabeth Ruth’s Smoke

2012· book-chapter· en· W2462587012 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Susan Billingham

Bibliographic record

VenuePalgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2012
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicCrime and Detective Fiction Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNarrativeGray (unit)QueerSuspectArt historyArtHistoryPsychoanalysisLiteraturePsychologyCriminologyMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Elizabeth Ruth’s second novel Smoke (2005) does not fit the generic category of crime fiction per se; rather, her work is representative of a growing number of queer fictions that self-consciously play upon the multiple resonances of the outlaw. Making extensive use of the hermeneutic code, the text operates much like detective fiction, accumulating clues for the reader and the protagonist to decipher. Cultural insiders who understand the rules of the game will recognise precisely what type of outlaw is at stake at a relatively early stage. Set in the village of Smoke in the tobacco-growing region of south-western Ontario in 1958–1959, the narrative revolves around teenaged protagonist Buster McFiddie, disfigured for life in a fire, and the ageing Doctor John Gray, who becomes Buster’s mentor. To distract Buster from the physical and psychological pain of his injuries, Doc John tells him thrilling stories about the Purple Gang and other Detroit mobsters that he claims to recall from his youth in the 1920s and early 1930s. When their region becomes the target for a series of daring daylight robberies, some villagers suspect Buster is the culprit, and Buster in turn suspects the doctor. And there is no smoke without fire, although Doc John’s secret is not quite what Buster expects. The text is coded to be legible to the attentive reader, long before Buster uncovers the evidence for himself: John Gray, happily married to Alice for almost 25 years, is transgendered1 — which in this particular historical time and place “makes him a wanted man” (Ruth 2005: 253).

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)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.884
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.070
GPT teacher head0.263
Teacher spread0.193 · 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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
Published2012
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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