Precarious Bodies in Precarious Times: <i>Her</i>storical Transcorporeality in Emma Donoghue’s <i>The Pull of the Stars</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article draws on the intersection of the metahistorical, corporeal and material turn in contemporary cultural theory, with a focus on Emma Donoghue’s novel The Pull of the Stars (2020), incidentally written to commemorate a centenary of the Spanish flu in Britain, and suddenly appearing prophetic of the COVID-19 situation in 2020–2021, with unintentional, but poignant parallels. The methodological framework used for the article is transmodern metahistory, as well as new materialism, with its important concepts of transcorporeality (Alaimo) and intra-action (Barad). The article examines women’s (bodily) lives in 1918 Dublin as depicted in the novel, against the tempestuous political and military historical context furnishing the background for the material, temporal and discursive entanglements and shared vulnerabilities, which are the centre of the narrative. It also touches upon topical issues and processes characterizing the present-day world, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic, #MeToo and BLM movements, social injustice and intersectional feminism, as well as silenced traumatic historical phenomena, such as the cruelty and abuse of Irish and Canadian residential institutions, and the larger issue of livable lives—a crucial topic for women writers today.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".