From Silence to Breath: An Irigarayan Study of the Representation of Motherhood in Modern Drama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mother is a cultural symbol in Western civilization, ‘a symbol so powerful that it shapes the dominant structures of Western thought’ (Lynn Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures , p. 7). At the Montreal Conference on ‘Women and Madness’ (May 1980), Luce Irigaray put forward the argument that Western civilization is founded on matricide. She says, ‘when Freud describes and theorizes, notably in Totem and Taboo , the murder of the father as founding the primal horde, he forgets a more archaic murder, that of the mother, necessitated by the establishment of a certain order in the polis’ (‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, p. 36). In an interview with Thérèse Dumonchel and Marie-Madeleine Raoult soon afterwards, Irigaray reiterates this point: ‘the whole of our Western culture is based upon the murder of the mother (‘Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order’, p. 47). Matricide, the killing of the mother to ensure the implementation of masculine orders, lies at the foundation of Western civilization. This contention should be understood more culturally than literally. The killing does not signify just the elimination of the mother as a physical existence, but above all the removal of the mother from social responsibilities, the silencing of the mother’s speech, and the repression of the mother’s desires. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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 | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".