In Search of Monkey Girl: Disability, Child Welfare, and the Freak Show in Ontario in the 1970s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we examine the brief exhibition of and public debate over “The Monkey Girl” exhibit at the intersection of the freak show, disability, and child welfare in the 1960s and 1970s. The critical moment was triggered by the limited but powerful outcry against the exhibition of a five-year-old girl (identified only as Pookie) as The Monkey Girl at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in 1973. We argue that wider shifts in understandings of child welfare—particularly, the notion of the best interests of the child, a standard for the determination of child custody in divorce cases, which places emphasis on the well-being of children, not the rights of parents—as well as the emergence of poverty and disability rights movements provided the impetus to end the freak show at Canada’s largest exhibition. By the time of Pookie’s display in the early 1970s, calls for inclusion of people with what was then known as mental retardation had hit the national agenda, along with issues of poverty and child abuse.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".