Alterity, Recognition and Performance: The Queer and the Animal in Makeda Silvera’s “Caribbean Chameleon”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores notions of performativity in the story “Caribbean Chameleon,” published in Makeda Silvera’s collection Her Head a Village (1994). The story emphasises problems of performing with regards to the categories of race and gender as they pertain to the lived experience of Anglo-Caribbean migrants in Canada, a country which, in spite of its ostensible positive engagement with difference, is nevertheless still systemically hostile to migrants. Being able to adequately “perform” race or gender in a non-threatening way for the system becomes imperative for migrants, which the story highlights framing its critique of racial profiling within the conventions of the stage. This opens the door to examining the types of performativity with which “Caribbean Chameleon” engages. In this article, I discuss how notions of performance, performing and performativity interact with representations of queerness and animality, which provide and constitute modes of alterity that intersect with questions of race, gender, and (un)belonging that are raised in the story.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".