Injury, Affirmation, and the Disability Masquerade in Ye’s “Through the Wire”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ye’s song “Through the Wire” exists in two versions. The first was recorded in late 2002 after a near-fatal car crash and features Ye rapping through a jaw wired shut as he recovered from reconstructive surgery. After he healed, a second version was recorded in 2003 and released as the lead single from his debut album. Although Ye raps unimpeded in this later version, it was still marketed as the authentic product of physical disablement. This study explores Ye’s performance of disability across these two versions of “Through the Wire,” focusing on his engagement with a phenomenon known as the masquerade. Adapted from queer and feminist studies to a disability context by Tobin Siebers, the masquerade encompasses a set of strategies for the public negotiation of disabled identities. Two prominent approaches involve 1) exaggerating a disability through a performative act of disclosure, and 2) disguising one disability behind another. I argue that Ye engages in both strategies throughout “Through the Wire,” and that attending to their roles in the song greatly nuances the straightforward narrative of overcoming that he otherwise projects.
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.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".