Multidirectional vulnerabilities: Trauma, bare life, and resistance in June Hutton’s <i>Underground</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article offers an analysis of Underground, published by Canadian writer June Hutton in 2009. The main protagonist of the novel is a young Canadian, Albert Fraser, who suffers severe shock and disillusionment in the trenches of the First World War. He faces unemployment and destitution during the Great Depression and eventually joins the 1,700 Canadian volunteers who fought in the anti-fascist cause during the Spanish Civil War. My purpose is to analyse Hutton’s representation of the Canadian veterans’ difficult reintegration in the post-war years and the protagonist’s prise de conscience which ultimately leads him to Spain, despite his hatred of war. While discussing the veterans’ discontent and the Canadian government’s attempts to control this unruly population, I refer to Judith Butler’s conceptualization of precariousness and precarity, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical reflection on biopolitics and bare life. Central in my reading is the terrain of the camp — the hobo camp, the relief camp, and the POW camp — as a site of biopolitical exclusion, yet also a space of encounter that triggers ethical reflection. Furthermore, I demonstrate how the novel stages unexpected alliances between the protagonist and Chinese characters, which cause Fraser to revise his racist opinions. I propose the concept of multidirectional vulnerabilities to explore the parallels between these apparently disjointed geographies and temporalities. The article shows how Hutton represents the vulnerability of Canadian bodies in a historical period of socio-political upheavals, yet at the same time locates in their vulnerability the possibility of resistance and an alternative ethics.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| 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".