Monster Studies: Liminality, Home Spaces, and Ina Vampires in Octavia E. Butler's<i>Fledgling</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Octavia Butler's final science fiction novel, Fledgling (2005), explores ways her liminar protagonist, Shori, undergoes ritualized transformations while in exile from her home community. During this process, she engages in psychological, physical, political, and social transitions through what Victor Turner and Mikhail Bakhtin would describe as carnivalesque identities and communities. Shori, the lost child of an ancient species of near immortals who live in dark symbiosis with humans, produces subversive and grotesque sites of home and family in this process. In a state of separation and amnesia, Shori awakens outside her gated community and moves back and forth over metaphoric thresholds. She reverses hierarchical race and gender positions as she creates a world that opposes traditional vampire lore and the American family. Furthermore, Shori's act of “biting” victims for their blood sees them feed on a venom with physical and psychic healing properties, thus creating a grotesque communitas relationship.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".