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
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.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".