MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4319787254 · doi:10.1080/14742837.2023.2175655

Fearful or fearless? The impact of fear on feminist activism

2023· article· en· W4319787254 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Mélissa Blais

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial movement studies · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCommunism, Protests, Social Movements
Canadian institutionsUniversité du Québec en Outaouais
FundersUniversité du Québec à Montréal
KeywordsAngerAction (physics)SociologySocial psychologyHuman sexualityPsychologyGender studies

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Fear is an emotion we generally try to avoid. It is associated with reflexes such as immobility, flight or, in the case of activism, demobilization. This article partially questions this received wisdom based on empirical research with feminists in Quebec (Canada) and Romandie (Switzerland). This article suggests that fear can also sometimes be a ‘drive to action’ for feminists and, at other times, rein in their activism. It first examines the varying effects of fear on feminist activism and links these to the different positioning of feminists within social relations of race, class and sexuality. Second, it suggests that the origin of the fear, its interactions with other emotions, and the emotional work performed by interviewees were other key factors shaping the impact of fear on their activism. In other words, we will discuss four main emotional sequences which take different directions depending on whether the fear stems from police violence, male violence, fear for one’s reputation or fear of exclusion. We will also look at the effects they give rise to: protective mechanisms, censorship, deepening knowledge and partial withdrawal from majority feminist circles. The article further addresses the fear of male violence which pushes many to become involved in the feminist movement. Combined with anger and emotional work to reduce its intensity, fear acts as a true driving force for action. Additionally, the article shows that factors which impede feminist activism are mostly related to a minority position in the movement and repeated anti-feminist threats.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.060
Threshold uncertainty score0.119

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0050.014
Scholarly communication0.0050.002
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.170
GPT teacher head0.473
Teacher spread0.304 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations7
Published2023
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueSocial movement studiesSame topicCommunism, Protests, Social MovementsFrench-language works237,207