Miriam Toews’<i>Women Talking</i>and the Embodied Life of Feminist Nonviolence
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.”
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it