Critical Appraisal and Masculine Authority: The Boys Clubs’ Derogatory Method of Reading Canadian Feminist Speculative Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Culture scholars have shown that cultural intermediaries play a crucial role in the reproduction of inequalities in consecration (Corse and Westervelt, 2002; Maguire Smith and Matthews, 2012; Miller, 2014; Ridgeway, 2011; Steinberg, 1990 cited in Bourdieu, 2010). However, the analysis of gender inequalities in reception and canonization has focused on individual bias, neglecting the contribution of scholars of hegemonic masculinity about the importance of patterned practices in the reproduction of men’s dominance over women (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Given that art worlds are not settings where typical markers of hegemonic masculinity are valued, such as money and physical prowess, what are the tools of hegemonic masculinity in art worlds? I answer this question through a comparative analysis of the reception of two iconic Canadian feminist novels: L’Euguélionne (2012 [1976]) by Louky Bersianik and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood. Building on feminist scholarship, I find that the discursive apparatus of hegemonic masculinity in art worlds consists of a derogatory method of reading employed by critics in newspapers. This method of reading is founded on three discursive components: (i) a reductive reading of feminist politics; (ii) a man-centred assessment of feminism and (iii) a questioning of women’s creative credibility which belittles the contribution of feminist authors. By translating the concept of boys’ club (Delvaux, 2019) and identifying its derogatory method of reading, I propose a framework that illuminates how critical appraisal shapes discursive resources available for both professional and non-professional readers to draw upon for evaluation and classification of women’s cultural productions and feminist engagements.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".