“They Kiss and the [Odd Body] Swells”: Fragmenting Queer Bodies in 1980s Canadian Drama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fragmented queer body—that is, the isolated parts of the odd or deviant body—is a pervasive element of Sky Gilbert’s intense plays The Dressing Gown and Ladylike, both about queer autonomy. Parts of the homosexual and transsexual body act as distinct representations and expansions of profound politics to semiotically convey and understand the absence of queer bodies on the Canadian stage. Queer bodies become physical forms, acting as entities which, whether ugly or admirable, rapidly adapt to unfamiliar conditions, exposing and attacking the majority of the audience’s inclination toward normative responses. This research project contextualizes Canadian queer theatre by analyzing the symbolic function of queer identities and their body parts. In addition, the project uses theatre, performance studies, and literary studies as theoretical and methodological frameworks to analyze the public display of the transsexual and homosexual body in their performative grotesque mode, and addresses audience rejection, internalized self-hatred, and, finally, poetic responses to this process. The allegorical and symbolic figures in these two plays, as exemplified by the plasticity of the queer body and a robust amount of scholarship, suggest that the plays’ endings mark only the beginning of the fragmented queer body’s poetic potential. But the intensity of the imagery in Ladylike and The Dressing Gown is found not only in elements of hatred and discrimination; when the queer bodies have disappeared, the unsettled mood defining the endings changes, and the corporeality of the queer body seems more dismembered and omnipresent than ever.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".