Towards an intersectional literary criticism: Cross-Identity representations, social location, and Shani Mootoo’s intervention
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores how literary critics can approach cross-identity representations in a way that addresses the complex use of alterity by authors who re/construct pluralistic societies and are also marginalized by the colonial matrix of power. Recent theorists such as Mark Bracher have noted that social justice is as imperative to literary scholarship as the late 20th- to early 21st- century aesthetic turn (identified by Ruth Gilligan) that decried an overemphasis on political readings. It is argued here that literary criticism should use an intersectional approach. Key elements of intersectionality, as articulated by Sirma Bilge and Patricia Hill Collins, are applied to literary study and in particular to Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. Such a framework makes the question of “good” and “bad” representations irrelevant and uses authorial identity as but one piece of a larger literary approach that honours the complexity of literature alongside undeniable power dynamics.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it