Queering Reproductive Time: Jacob’s Wrestling and Queer Temporalities in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her book Motherhood, Sheila Heti transforms her titular subject into a state of wrestling. She divorces motherhood from biological reproduction and expands it. The result is a version of motherhood oriented toward the past rather than reproductive futures. This article argues that Heti relies on queer tropes and the biblical story of Jacob wrestling to accomplish motherhood’s transvaluation. Those tropes reproduce the antisocial theory of queerness popularized by Lee Edelman and position queerness as antithetical to reproductive futures. Jacob’s wrestling, associated with the naming of a patriarch and Jewish futures, becomes a space for interrogating conventional definitions of motherhood. The concept’s resignification contributes to current debates around Jewish continuity in North America by offering a more inclusive view of motherhood. This article shows how Heti’s work draws attention to heteronormative foundations of continuity discourses and the question of recognizing queer futures.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".