It’s All About the Body: Zombification and the Male Gaze in Oryx and Crake and Brown Girl in the Ring
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to analyse the commodification of women of colour in two dystopian Canadian novels: Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), by Nalo Hopkinson, and Oryx and Crake (2003), by Margaret Atwood. I argue that the women in these stories are subjected to similar patriarchal strategies of control. Namely, I suggest they are zombified through the male gaze, or in other words, they are regarded as ambulatory bodies by their societies. This draws attention to the Canadian government’s neoliberal policies that often belie neocolonial undertones in their usage of the bodies of women of colour. In addition to this, I will focus on the characters’ ability to resist this totalising and zombifying gaze through different means. Here I posit that Hopkinson presents a world that emphasises commonality among women and, therefore, her characters are more successful in dismantling patriarchal structures. In opposition to this, I argue that Atwood’s novel isolates Oryx which makes her unable to achieve structural change, and therefore she chooses to become an elusive figure as a form of protest.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".