“Usable Paradoxical Space”: Negotiating Captivity and the Gaze in Michelle Mohabeer’s film Blu in You
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To this special issue of Canada and Beyond on “Caribbean Canadian” cultural production, this article offers a reappraisal of spectacular violence in the legacy of Sarah Baartman, as explored by Guyanese Canadian filmmaker Michelle Mohabeer. Mohabeer’s film Blu in You confronts the racist, heteronormative violences that underpin Western modernity, in particular objectification of the gaze over racialized Black and queer women, in the process situating queer Caribbean Canadian women as Baartman’s resistant inheritors. This paper seeks strategies for addressing the limitations imposed on queer critical race critique by inherited and flawed systems of knowledge. In particular, it explores the paradoxes that arise in addressing the legacies of Sarah Baartman using visual art. I use Mohabeer’s film and its references to Baartman and captivity, routed through feminist critical race critique, to propose ways of imagining liberatory epistemologies within compromised contexts, the critical inhabitation of delimited positions, and the exercise of transformative agency within restricted zones.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".