"Mirror, Mirror on the All, Who's the Fairest One of All": Troubling Gendered Identities. (Research Articles/Rapports De Recherche)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper playfully uses text, photographs, participant interviews, autobiographical stories and metaphor of a mirror to explore power and limitations of three strategies for troubling gender. Firstly, look to outdoors as an escape, investigating what it means to break into in effect, breaking away from media/cultural influences that lure us to invest in hegemonic femininity. Secondly, I discuss changing face of those media/cultural influences through creating counter-representations of femininities. Thirdly, I explore notion of performativity and other post-structural theories of identity and body as a way to expose artifice of gender and play with male/female dualism. Cet article emploie de facon enjouee des photos, des entretiens participatifs ainsi que du texte en cojonction avec la metaphore du miroir afin de sonder le pouvoir et les limites emanant de trois strategies contestatrices du genre. Dans un premier temps, je me penche sur l'exterieur comme vole de sortie, examinant l'idee d'une 'fugue' vers la nature, rompant, effectivement, avec les influences mediatiques et culturelles nous convoitant investir dans l'hegemonie feminine. Ensuite, je propose la transformation de 'image de ces intluences mediatiques et culturelles en creant des contre-representations de la feminite. Dans un troisieme temps, je sonde la notion de la performativite et d'autres theories identitaires et corporelles post-structurelles afin d'exposer l'artifice du genre et de jouer avec le dualisme male/femelle. ********** I ambivalently desire to be her, one, despite racist subtexts in fairness of beauty. The mirror is alluring. It is a magnifying glass where I might glimpse surface of cultural text that is myself. A device that measures beauty to be reflected back and judged by viewer? That measures achievement of a feminine identity? A measure of control, through which we discipline our own bodies? Or a porthole to another place? How do we see in mirrors? The reflection(s), I find, are not merely reflection(s) but are somehow intricately tied to who I am, influencing me as I influence them. Most troubling to me is that lingering desire to be fairest one of all while at same time desiring nothing of sort. Simply put, why do I take part in practices of hegemonic femininity which I recognize as subordinating, specifically raced and classed, and completely contrary to my feminist beliefs? Teasing out threads of this desire and following them to see where they go and w here they have come from might somehow show me a way to unlearn desire that I have so painfully learned. Because this desire is so tightly bound up with gendered identity, my approach will be to look at several ways of troubling gender (after Butler, 1990), exploring different paths leading out of disabling comers of feminine identities. I begin in a place where there are no mirrors; that contradictory and complex space variously known as the outdoors, and nature. Drawing from my own background as an outdoor instructor, I became interested in how gender is performed in this traditionally male domain. In fall of 1999 and spring of 2000, I conducted ongoing interviews with several other women who work for Canadian Outward Bound Wilderness School' in order to tease out a more complex picture of gendered outdoor space. This research also involved a focus group interview, a collective art project, and individual reflective journals from all participants as other means of exploring and recording insights and perspectives. Simultaneously I undertook a photographic exploration of gender identity and urban/nature dualisms, enacting various readings and interweavings of femininity, wilderness, and culture. The body, canoe, mirror, clothing, background and foreground are all performing in this project that attempts to t rouble hegemonic femininity. …
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".