Queer and Present Danger: Freakery and Sapphic Desire in Maria Edgeworth’s <i>Belinda</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the relationship between (dis)ability and sexuality in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Jason Farr argues that (dis)ability and sexuality are “mutually constitutive” in the eighteenth century and demonstrates the link between conceptions of (dis)ablebodiedness and non-heteronormativity. I argue that the constitutive relationship is bifurcated across two characters from Edgeworth’s novel: Harriet Freke’s sexual divergence constitutes her disability, and Lady Delacour’s experience of disability and chronic pain constitutes her sexual ambiguity and Sapphic possibilities. A queer-crip reading of Belinda demonstrates that Lady Delacour experiences intimate relationships with women and her husband through her injured breast and chronic pain. Harriet Freke’s divergent gender performance disables her under the chastising gaze of the other characters, and, in the end, she is permanently, physically marked by an injury. Lady Delacour experiences a cure of her long-term injury that results in a transformation to the ennobled, contemporary form of heterosexual domesticity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".