Lez Play! An Aesthetic Discourse Analysis of Allyson Mitchell’s <i>Ladies Sasquatch</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Discourse analysis often overlooks the role of aesthetic experience in the formation of relations of power through meaning. This paper presents an aesthetic discourse analysis of Canadian artist Allyson Mitchell’s Ladies Sasquatch, a celebrated sculpture-installation of six gigantic naked Sasquatches. I argue that by integrating expectations rooted in fine art sensibilities, playfulness and nostalgia into the physical instantiation of an untamed, separatist collective of queer mythological beasts, Ladies Sasquatch tactically uses aesthetic experience—through feelings of uncertainty, anticipation and belonging—to reclaim public space for radical, political lesbian experience. Aesthetic discourse analysis of Ladies Sasquatch demonstrates how aesthetic experience can influence and shape discourse outcomes in the context of resistance to dominant forms of understanding, in this case by challenging the legitimacies of patriarchal norms while destabilizing the ways radical lesbian experience is delegitimized in mainstream cultural contexts.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".