Murdering Mothers? Representations of Mothers Who Kill Their Children in Theatre and Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This interdisciplinary thesis examines the representation of women who kill their children in theatre and law using a feminist maternal theoretical lens. Focalizing this examination is in the use of scholarship from Canadian criminal law and legal history from the discipline of Law, feminist maternal theory from the discipline of Gender and Womens Studies, and classical tragedy from the discipline of Classical Studies. The primary goal of this thesis is to show how the oppression of and attitudes towards mothers who kill their children have remained yet taken different forms within the patriarchal structure of society over time. For case studies this thesis uses Kate Mulvany and Ann-Louise Sarks 2012 adaptation of Euripides Medea and the 2011 Ontario court case R v. L.B.. This thesis concludes that the invisible father and the overvaluation of childhood innocence are the patriarchal parenting components that continue to oppress mothers. This thesis recommends that change would be brought about through public policy and feminist advocacy on the issues of meaningful and equal access to childcare, closing the gendered wage gap, and the encouragement and normalization of fathers taking parental leave.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".