Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyses Ann-Marie MacDonald’s 2014 novel Adult Onset as a text that brings the developmental literature of middle age into conversation with queer theories of temporality, family, and adulthood. Specifically, the novel invokes the narrative of the “mid-life crisis” to interrogate the concepts of queer progress and successful aging that its protagonist, a married lesbian mother and celebrated author named Mary Rose MacKinnon, outwardly embodies. Linking Mary Rose’s mid-life crisis with Jack Halberstam’s theory of “queer failure,” I argue that the text articulates a critique of the It Gets Better Project as a queer progress narrative and betrays Mary Rose’s deep ambivalence toward how her life in middle age conforms to a homonormative developmental script. At the same time, the crises of Mary Rose’s mid-life motherhood unsettle the homonormativity that appears to define her and contributes to a queering of family temporalities. Drawing upon Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of “growing sideways” but shifting the focus from growing up to growing old, I argue that the text brings Mary Rose into lateral relationships with other aging and old mothers in the text, both human and non-human. These lateral relationships not only offer alternatives to the concepts of progress and decline, success, and succession, which are at the root of normative conceptions of individual aging and generational time, but also move the discussion of mid-life in literature beyond anthropocentric understandings of what it means to age well in contemporary culture.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".