A Critical Analysis of the Term Barbaric Cultural Practices through An Examination of the S-7 Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act and the Harper Conservatives’ Discourses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2014, Canada’s Conservative government introduced the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act (Bill S-7), with the aim to protect Canadian women and girls, especially Brown and Muslim women, against gendered-based violence that uses culture as an excuse. However, in the context of the war on terror and anti-Muslim discourses during the Harper years, the title of Bill S-7 appears contradictory to its intended goal. The Conservative government engaged in activities that appear to ignore the interests of women, especially minority women in Canada (Olwan 2013). Through a critical discourse analysis of Conservative Ministers’ Parliamentary hansards during the debates for Bill S-7, this paper finds that the conservatives’ mobilization of the term barbaric cultural practices has three functions: Bill S-7 sends a strong message that Canada will not tolerate barbaric cultural practices; the Government has a responsibility to pursue a humanitarian immigration system; Bill S-7 would protect all women and girls from gendered-based violence that uses culture as an excuse. Using Sara Farris’ femonationalism framework, this paper argues that Bill S-7’s three functions advance Conservatives’ nationalist and neoliberal interests through the enforcement of a type of “patriotic neoliberal citizenship,” which promotes Canadian values as militarism, close ties with the British Crown, and economic independence over multiculturalism, among others (Abu-Laban 2018).
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".