"I became a woman through my words" : the Indigenous feminist writing of Lee Maracle and Beth Brant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the short story collections and auto/biographical, self-reflexive works of Lee Maracle (Stó:lō) and Beth Brant (Mohawk), arguing that the multi-generic nature of both writers’ work constitutes it as Indigenous feminist theory. Although Indigenous women’s writing continues to be marginalized in (white) academic contexts, their writing is not necessarily undertheorized in their own literary communities—indeed, this thesis understands Indigenous women’s writing as inherently theoretical because it analyzes the interdependent systems of racist and sexist oppression brought to bear on Indigenous women. Put differently, Indigenous women writing about their lived experiences constitutes theory. Both Maracle and Brant intervene in form and content as a refusal to be fixed by the heteropatriarchal, colonial gaze. On a formal level, Maracle draws on her conceptualization of “oratory,” a Stó:lō methodology for holistically engaging with written texts, to create hybrid, multi-generic written forms. Brant, on the other hand, writes across genres as a gesture of inclusivity to the multiple, marginalized communities she writes to and for; even more, her multi-generic writing mimics her intersectional Indigenous feminist praxis. On the level of content, both writers demonstrate that a firm division between their writing and their political concerns does not exist: Maracle’s writing on violence against Indigenous women, other-than-human beings, and the earth coincide with her political advocacy off the page, and the centrality of queer Indigenous and Two Spirit characters and desire in Brant’s writing speaks to its political necessity in larger heteronormative contexts. Reading these two authors alongside each other thus enables a fuller conceptualization of the theoretical power of Indigenous feminist writing as a decolonial methodology.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| 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".