Bibliographic record
Abstract
Few people know that Susanna Moodie participated in spiritual séances with her husband, Dunbar, and her sister, Catharine Parr Traill. Moodie, like many other women, found in her communications with the departed an important space to question her commitment to authorship and her understanding of femininity. Retracing the history of possession and mediumship among women following the emergence of spiritualism in mid-nineteenth-century Canada – and unearthing a vast collection of archival documents and photographs from séances – Claudie Massicotte pinpoints spiritualism as a site of conflict and gender struggle and redefines modern understandings of female agency. Trance Speakers offers a new feminist and psychoanalytical approach to the religious and creative practice of trance, arguing that by providing women with a voice for their conscious and unconscious desires, this phenomenon helped them resolve their inner struggles in a society that sought to confine their lives. Drawing attention to the fascinating history of spiritualism and its persistent appeal to women, Massicotte makes a strong case for moving this practice out of the margins of the past. A compelling new reading of spiritual possession as a response to conflicting interpretations of authorship, agency, and gender, Trance Speakers shines a much-needed light on women’s religious practices and on the history of spiritualist traditions and travels across North America and Europe.
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 | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.302 | 0.046 |
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".