Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, by Xine Yao. Reviewed by Marietta Kosma.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of U nfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling, arguing for "the humanity of minoritized subjects by enlisting the literature [of nineteenth-century America] to affirm that they feel too" (3). Yao makes a key intervention in our understanding of affect and politics in American literature by engaging with unfeeling and theorizing feeling as anti-social affect. Yao focuses on novels and stories that rely on the American scientific and legal discourses that regulate feeling to explore the spectrum of pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes of being. More specifically, Yao identifies four modes of disaffected unfeeling "in the cultural imagination [that are] deployed to flatten out and invalidate individual and collective subtleties" (6): unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, Black objective passionlessness, and Oriental inscrutability. Though Yao is interested in the ways American literature perceives affect, her research extends beyond the geographical and historical confines of nineteenth-century fiction and focuses on "questions[ing] the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21).
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".