‘Don’t Call Me White’: Fashioning Sami Zayn’s Arabic and transnational identities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Though mainstream professional wrestling depends on and benefits from anglo-normative, Western hegemony, contemporary wrestling also subverts and parodies it. One character who can be read as white, Sami Zayn, undermines this hegemony through subtly asserting his Arabic and transnational identities. In wrestling, a character’s apparel functions as a metonym for the character, and with his tights Zayn counters mainstream Islamophobic discourse about Arabs post 9/11. Zayn’s tights are decorated with many national flags, Arabic characters and Roman letters to show he possesses a complex identity influenced by not only his ethnic heritage (Syrian) and country of birth (Canada), but every country he has visited and the cultures within them. His popularity and success allow a space within World Wrestling Entertainment for non-white characters to perform identities not limited to caricatures of their ethnic and racial backgrounds.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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".