The Lessons of Travel: Teaching Queer Asian Canada through Joella Cabalu’s <i>It Runs in the Family</i> and Alejandro Yoshizawa’s <i>All our Father’s Relations</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This short essay reflection mines two recent documentary films—Joella Cabalu’s It Runs in the Family and Alejandro Yoshizawa’s All our Father’s Relations—for pedagogical and curricular resources for queer(ing) Asian Canadian studies. Its focus is on the films’ common use of their subjects’ travels as narrative devices, highlighting particularly how these mobilities and the encounters that they enable provide opportunities for unpacking how the racial, gender and sexual politics of Asian Canadian subjectivities intersect with multiple colonialisms, transnationalisms and migrations in the Pacific Rim. Each in its own way, the films tackle normative gender, racial, class, sexual and religious orders, including non-normative heterosexualities. As well, for students of Asian Canadian studies and Asian diaspora studies, they offer crucial illustrations of queerness not as LGBT identity per se, but as fraught relationships to legally, religiously and socially enforced notions of proper domesticity, citizenship and subjectivity. Both films also offer important engagements with Canadian legal regimes and narratives around social difference, albeit with different political and ethical investments. While All our Father’s Relations tackles the queerness of mixed-race Musqueam and Chinese subjects through a fierce interrogation of the conjoined legal projects of Indigenous and migrant control in Canada, It Runs in the Family belies an investment in the notion of Canadian progressivism on LGBT issues. As teaching resources, the films illustrate the importance of queer of colour approaches for theorizing Asian Canada, including and especially its historical, transnational, settler colonial and lived dimensions.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".