Transformations of Gender and Race in Maria Riddell’s Transatlantic Biopolitics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Maria Riddell’s Voyages to the Madeira, and Leeward Caribbean Isles (1792), offers new understandings of the mutability and hybridity of race, gender, sex, and nation in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic colonies. By foregrounding Riddell’s engagements with natural history, this article places botanical and zoological classificatory systems in conversation with her depictions of how white women colonists and enslaved African labourers utilized the natural world. In addition to the ideas of contemporary naturalists, such as Linnaeus, Leclerc, comte de Buffon, and Smellie, Riddell’s work is also situated in relation to that of Erasmus Darwin, Edward Long, and Janet Schaw. At a time of significant political revolutions, Riddell’s travel narra tive affords insight into implications for the Caribbean colonies and their function as an environment of sociobiological transformation. While eighteenth-century writing often represented the West Indies as a site of biological and social degeneration, this essay shows that they were also depicted as a site of improvement and a sphere of knowledge-making that produced hybrid identities, knowledges, and cultures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".