Untouchable: ‘disabling’ cinema’s contract on contact in <i>The Diving Bell and the Butterfly</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historically, cinematic spectacles of acquired impairment have expended much energy negotiating the gender trouble that disability provokes in male bodies, typically infusing narratives of rehabilitation with fantasies of gender reconstruction. These gender crises arise because hegemonic expectations about masculine identity as synonymous with autonomy and dominance conflict with the normative social scripts framing disability as a state of helplessness and dependence. This paper explores the fraught intersection of disability and gender in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film that adapts the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby to evoke a visceral experience of ‘locked-in syndrome.’ Drawing upon Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological conception of ‘film’s body,’ I develop a more particular account of the ways in which male bodies are embedded in social networks that grant affective intensity and political charge to the sensuous experience of touch within cinema. In what has to be the most extraordinary use of literal first-person perspective in the history of cinema, the film deploys the conventionally untouchable camera body to explore the intimacy and terror of being touched (intrusions to which both patient and viewer must yield), mounting a challenge to popular cinema’s dominant gaze, and the normative body it so often assumes on behalf of viewers.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".