Pecola’s People: Microhistories, the Politics of Respectability, and Interrogations of the Power of the Outside Gaze
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through an examination of the microhistories of three select communities (African American women, twentieth-century gay and lesbian activists in the U.S., and the presumed audience that heard 1 Timothy), the article interrogates the hyper-normative standards or “outside gaze” that marginalized communities often internalize in their quests for respectability or acceptance from more dominant social powers. The article argues that such standards (whether in the form of middle-class decorum, cisgendered heteronormativity, or ancient Rome’s notions of piety) must be challenged by counternarratives because such standards are discursive frames and restrictive binaries rooted in histories of power and domination. Such frames police thought, presuppose a deficit of one kind or another in the marginalized communities, and inevitably lead such marginalized groups down a path of psychic scarring and self-loathing.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".