Liberation on the Dance Floor: Collective Dance and Queer Politics in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I consider Black Lives Matter—Toronto’s (BLM-TO) protest at the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade and reflect on the demands—the majority of which relate to the (re-)establishment and support of spaces for collective music participation. Following BLM-TO’s lead, I contend that music participation is vital for forging a sense of community and collective agency for queer individuals in Canada. I read BLM-TO’s protest alongside two specific examples of community organizing in Canadian lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirited + history that privilege the dance floor as an integral space of politics: the Gay Alliance for Equality (GAE) in Halifax and the Gay Community Dance Committee (GCDC) in Toronto. I claim that the dance spaces of the GAE and the GCDC were transformative for Canadian gay and lesbian liberation politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Ultimately, by reading the historical efforts of the GAE and the GCDC alongside the contemporary demands of BLM-TO, I argue that music and dance spaces in which queer individuals can come together—spaces animated by the musical and collective dance traditions of communities of colour—have long been integral to queer formation in this country.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.053 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".