Race, ethnicity, sexuality, and blood in contemporary black women´s speculative fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how the issues of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are discussed in the novel 'Fledgling' (2006) by Octavia Butler, in the novel 'Brown Girl in the Ring' (1998) and in the short story 'Greedy Choke Puppy' (2001) by Nalo Hopkinson, and in the novel 'The Living Blood' (2001) by Tananarive Due. These works are examples of speculative fiction, an umbrella genre that encompasses others such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the gothic, and that comments on social constructions and current society by creating alternative beings and ways of life. Written by black women in in the United States and Canada at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s, the works analyzed here show that race, ethnicity, and sexuality are common concerns for the three writers. This is so because these issues, which are constructed by social and cultural discourses that often result in discrimination and marginalization, are interconnected, especially in the lives and identities of black women. This investigation also analyzes how Butler, Hopkinson, and Due use the symbolism of blood in their speculative representations of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. More specifically, the reference to blood in their works often points to racial and sexual abjection, to the black ancestry, the family line, and the ethnic bonds of the protagonists, as well as to a transgressive sexuality and a possibility of nurturance, providing specific discussions about race, ethnicity, and sexuality from the perspective of black women in a contemporary context. Their works imagine a world in which the black race, the ethnicities of African origin, female sexuality, and maternity have a fundamental role for the future of humanity, contradicting, therefore, age-old and prejudiced racist and sexist discourses.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".