What’s All the Yap? Reading Mirha-Soleil Ross’s Performance of Activist Pedagogy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly one of the hardest working. A Toronto-based performance artist, film- and video-maker and activist on a wide range of issues, Ross is also the chief architect of Counting Past 2, the first festival of transsexual and transgender art and performance in North America.1 In this paper, I look at Ross’s most ambitious and professionally successful performance work to date, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore, a sequence of performance monologues in which Ross brings together her concerns with sex-worker, animal and transsexual rights and reflects upon her fifteen years as a prostitute and activist.2 Straddling the genres of spoken word, dramatic monologue and multi-media performance, Yapping Out Loud utilized video footage of coyotes living in the wild and being hunted, live music and voice recordings by prostitute- and animal-rights activists to create multiple, shifting frames for Ross’s monologue in seven acts.
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 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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".