Disease, Desire and Devotion: Mobilities and Becoming-(m)other in Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Better Mother
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through the lens of mobilities, this article discusses the physical and mental tensions between mobility and immobility that confront male homosexuals during the embryonic stage of the HIV epidemic in Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Better Mother. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophical concept of “becoming-woman,” it further explores Danny, the Chinese Canadian homosexual protagonist’s “becoming-(m)other.” Bringing “becoming” into dialogue with the mobilities scholarship as a critical lens through which to address the issue of AIDS in the novel, this article argues that interracial (homosexual) (romantic) care/love has the potential power to mitigate the impact of the mysteriously mobile AIDS upon homosexual mobilities, both physical and metaphysical, and further to prompt them, especially Chinese Canadian male homosexuals, to face their homosexuality and rethink it as an ontological “becoming” that troubles heteronormativity.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".