Embodying the Global Metropolis: Tessa McWatt's This Body and Out of My Skin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay looks at two novels by Tessa McWatt, at her first novel Out of My Skin (1998), set in Montreal, and at one of her later novels This Body (2004), set in London, Toronto, and Guiana. Both novels address issues of origin and belonging, of nationhood, and of the global metropolis, and in both novels the female protagonists change urban space in practices which bring the knowledge, habits, and stories of other places into the city. As the novels' titles already indicate, these practices have a distinctly corporeal component to them as McWatt’s protagonists experience their losses and migratory displacements through their bodies and try to inscribe their difference into the space of the city. Daphne in Out of My Skin and Victoria in This Body counteract their feelings of disembodiment and displacement in embodied practices. This essay focuses on walking and cooking as two quotidian practices which physically engage us in understanding the world and which defy the Western body/mind split.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".