Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a white dress – baptismal, communion or confirmation – that appears in select poems of three Caribbean women poets, Jennifer Rahim (Trinidad), M. NourbeSe Philip (Trinidad/Canada) and Barbara Ferland (Jamaica). The dress is intended to be worn by Afro-Caribbean girls in a church, sacred, or sacramental context and speak to matters of purity in the female/girl child who is so clad. At the same time, the dress - spotless or yellowed - exposes the impurity, danger, and impiety of the Afro-Caribbean female body that is laid bare in the sacramental and sacred space of Church. This article will explore the experience of “sacred misogynoir” as expressed in Rahim, Philip, and Ferland via the symbolism of the (unstained) white dress. Drawing on the work of C. M. Webster, which unveils how Christian practices exiled Afro-Caribbean women from human and feminine value systems, I draw attention to how these women counter such disvaluing with bodily practices that promoted, (re)valued, and affirmed their body-selves, especially in sacred spaces. Webster’s research, in conversation with these poets, illustrates the need for a reframing and revaluing of the Afro-Caribbean female body in sacred spaces such that white dresses no longer function to oppress and devalue.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.013 |
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".