Situating the S-Slur Within the Colonial Imaginary: The Shaping and Shaming of Indigenous Un/Womanhood in Western Canada during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper charts the shifting connotations, uses and impacts of the s-slur, a derogatory term used by colonizers to refer to Indigenous women, in archival Western Canadian newspapers. It aims to demonstrate the influences of hetero-patriarchy, racism, and capitalism on the perception of Indigenous ‘un/womanhood’ during the expansion of the settler state. It draws upon feminist and linguistic frameworks to examine the coloniality of gender, naming, and slurs. By examining how the use of the s-slur fluctuated between insinuations of victimhood (in relation to Indigenous gender roles, traditions, and marriage) and threat (in association with sexual deviancy and sex work), this paper aims to demonstrate how the term represented both sides of the racialized gender dichotomy, depending on how it could best serve the colonial project. This research is an attempt to understand the legacies of violence inflicted by, and encapsulated in, the use of this word towards Indigenous women, and to argue for the necessity of de-normalizing its use.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it