Analogies of harm: excess, expression, and obscenity in Margaret Atwood’s <i>Bodily Harm</i> and the Supreme Court of Canada decision <i>R v Butler</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thinking through Margaret Atwood’s 1981 novel Bodily Harm and the 1992 Supreme Court of Canada case R v Butler, this article examines a Canadian discussion about the excessiveness of the freedom of expression to which obscenity has been key. For Atwood, expression is central to Bodily Harm’s narrative of personal, political revelation. Yet it is also at the root of a discourse of harm that Atwood elucidates throughout the novel as she incorporates pornography into an expansive analogic continuity of violence. In Butler, the Supreme Court curtails obscenity in the name of equality and collective well-being, even as it continues to view expression as a valuable individual freedom and a national good. In each text freedom of expression both is and is not safeguarded; in each, the freedom can be conceived of and celebrated, but its excessive possibilities must also be contained.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".