Feeling Sideways: Shani Mootoo and Kai Cheng Thom’s Sustainable Affects
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist theory, this article examines the transmission of affect between racialized queer and trans subjects as a mode of what I call feeling sideways. With this formulation, I seek to spark a discussion about the need to dislodge affect not only from gender and racial normative systems of power but also from linear understandings of growth and temporality. I here follow Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theories of sideways growth (2009) and Heather Love’s notion of backward feelings (2009) to unravel modes of feeling sideways as a potential form of what I call sustainable affect. As case studies, I put two transCanadian works beside each other: Shani Mootoo’s novel Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab (2014) and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry collection a place called No Homeland (2017). In different but related ways, these texts illustrate how shame, anger, and empathy can become sustainable affects through touch and storytelling, with important ethical repercussions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it