The Divine Women in Women Talking: Restorative Imagination for a Divine Becoming
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper will examine how Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel, Women Talking builds on its initial themes of women’s subjugation to men, their systematic oppression through religion, and their inability to reclaim their lives, to ultimately evolve into an account of women’s emancipation and divine becoming through the exercise of their restorative imagination. The novel spans two days during which eight women from the ultra-religious and patriarchal Mennonite community of Molotschna in Bolivia engage in several discussions pertaining to different aspects of their lives. These conversations very casually unfold the horror of unimaginable cruelty in the name of religion and unforgiving patriarchy as practiced within their closed community. Keeping this bleak setting in the background, Women Talking is also a tale of these women’s divine becoming, as propounded by Luce Irigaray in her essay, “Divine Women.” The resilience showed on part of these broken and abused women and the unprecedented bold decision to which they collectively arrive towards the end of the novel, is a demonstration of the courage and restorative imagination that they unknowingly harbored within themselves, the exercise of which results ultimately in their divine becoming
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".