Unsettling the System of Sexual and Ethnic Oppression in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The contemporary novel titled Funny Boy (1994) by Shyam Selvadurai, a Sri Lankan Canadian writer is set in Sri Lanka against the traumatic struggles of ethnicity between majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils in the early 1980s. The novel has six chronologically interconnected stories, each concerning the subaltern central character in terms of race, sexuality and gender. The protagonist Arjun Chelvaratnam (Arjie) belonging to Tamil minority household experiences conflicting emotions imposed by rigid and repressive codes of the patriarchal family that forbids him to indulge in his love of cross-dressing game juxtaposed with a series of calamitous ethnic clashes in the country. Racially, there are political restrictions imposed on the minority Tamil groups and within the domestic sphere, Arjie undergoes sexual unease due to his unconventional sexual orientation. This study aims to explore Arjie’s plight in realizing his emerging sexuality thus transgressing the restrictive borders of gender and desirability. Further, to ascertain the theoretical insight about the process of gendered ‘othering’, Michel Foucault’s idea of power is consulted to justify and provide critical views on the marginalization of the third gender as power discourse in society.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".