Neoliberalism and Gender Equality: Canadian Newspapers’ Representations of the Ban of Face Coverings at Citizenship Ceremonies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In late 2011, Canada’s Conservative government banned face coverings for those taking oath at citizenship ceremonies. The ban was unequivocally interpreted by the press to be targeting veil-wearing Muslim women. This paper analyzes newspaper coverage in the month following the announcement of the policy. It argues that most commentators conceptualized citizenship to be a neoliberal tool of rescuing veiled Muslim women from their male oppressors and making them more like the equal/neoliberal “us” and/or as a reward for those who already are or will become equal/neoliberal. Most non-Muslim commentators constructed gender oppression as the reason for which veiled women should (not) become citizens. Gender equality in Canada was represented as a key national value and inequality was erased or minimized and presented as a Muslim problem. In attempting to deflect these arguments, most Muslim commentators silenced gender inequality among Muslims by arguing that veiled Muslim women choose the practice and by relegating gender oppression to Western societies, thereby constructing veiled Muslim women as ideal neoliberal subjects worthy of Canadian citizenship. Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v11i1.253
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".