Force-Feeding: Consumption and Sexuality in Frank G. Paci's Black Madonna
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Informed by calls to re-evaluate the relationship between Canadian literature and power in the wake of Canada’s sesquicentennial, this paper examines Frank G. Paci’s Black Madonna, a 1982 Italian-Canadian novel that played a significant role in early discussions of Canadian multiculturalism. This paper reassesses Paci’s representation of the protagonist Marie, a second-generation Italian-Canadian woman. Using Judith Butler’s concept of the construction of the gendered body and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, this paper analyzes Marie’s struggle for bodily control and her rejection of her Italian mother’s ideals about food, sexuality, and family. Through applying this framework of gender performativity and abjection of Otherness, this paper argues that Marie’s disordered relationships with food and her sexuality are a result of the pressure on second-generation female immigrants to perform cultural identity while simultaneously assimilating into Anglo-Canadian culture. I contend that Marie’s rape fantasies and sexually transgressive encounters are indicative of the corporeal tensions faced by female immigrants in Canada, while her bulimic abjection of Italian food acts as a physical manifestation of the abjection of immigrant cultures by both Canadian multiculturalism and second generation immigrants within multiculturalism. This reassessment of Black Madonna provides a framework for re-reading early multicultural texts through a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between multiculturalism, gender, sexuality, food, and trauma.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".