Queering the Gaze: Calgary Hockey Breasts, Dynamics of Desire, and Colonial Hauntings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper compares two hockey-related breast-flashing events that occurred in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The first was performed by Calgary Flames fans, the ‘Flamesgirls’, in the 2004 NHL Stanley Cup final, and the second flashing event occurred when members and fans of the Booby Orr hockey team participated in lifting their shirts and jerseys at a lesbian hockey tournament at the 2007 Outgames/Western Cup held in Calgary. We deploy an analysis of visual psychic economies to highlight psychoanalytic framings of masculinized and feminized subject positions in both heteronormative and lesbigay-coded sporting spaces. We suggest there is a queer twist to the Booby Orr flashing context, which we read as disruptive and potentially resistive. The paper ends by turning to Avery Gordon’s (1997) Ghostly Matters, to consider how even in its queer transgression, the Booby Orr flashing scene is simultaneously haunted and saturated by the absent presence of colonial technologies of visuality and sexual violence. It is argued that in this case, openings for transgressive gender dynamics might be imaginable—even as those logics themselves are disciplined and perhaps made possible through racialized colonial framings of appropriate desire.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".