Miriam Toews’<i>Women Talking</i>and the Embodied Life of Feminist Nonviolence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking (2018), the women of a remote Mennonite colony discover that they have been serially raped in their sleep, and so they meet to plot a nonhierarchical community of their own. I argue that this transformation relies on gestures, postures, and reorientations that spur liberatory new ways of perceiving and participating in the world; consequently, their bodily comportment is essential to revolutionary worldmaking, as well as to how we might approach the novel beyond its titular emphasis on speech. The women’s rechoreography of the colony’s norms also revivifies nonviolence as agonistic and egalitarian—a tentpole of the Mennonite faith. My reading works across the entanglement of movement and transformation in Women Talking before thinking through its rehearsal of bodily relations or set of gestural and postural ethics that ultimately dispose these women and survivors toward radical forms of care and interdependence, or what Judith Butler might call “aggressive nonviolence.”
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".