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Record W4402281585 · doi:10.1080/23311983.2024.2398356

The veil as a site of struggle in Omaima Alkhamis’s  <i>Alwarifa</i>

2024· article· en· W4402281585 on OpenAlex
Mona Albassam

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCogent Arts and Humanities · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicIslamic Studies and History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSociologyPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Omaima Alkhamis’s Alwarifa (Citation2008) is a Saudi Arabian novel that captures the vivid experiences of Aljohara, a veiled Muslim physician residing in Canada. Despite its rootedness in contemporary cultural discourse on the veil, the novel remains largely underexplored globally. This article contextualizes its reading of Alwarifa within the broader context of scholarly work that seeks to reinterpret the meanings and legitimacy of the veil beyond the polarities of Western categorization. In particular, Massimo Leone’s conceptualization of the veil as a ‘meta-semiotic device’ whose ‘essence lies in its “betweenness”’ (Leone Citation2012, p. 276), creating fluid spaces that can evoke a diversity of meanings and complexities offers a useful paradigm to the reading of the narrative. As such, the reading of Alwarifa engages with the concept of veil within this context, where diverse geographical locations as well as acts of veiling and unveiling foster a sense of ‘betweenness’. Aljohara’s veil with its material manifestations, as I will argue, holds her in a state of ‘betweenness’ that is emotionally and geographically driven. The opportunities for self-discovery presented by Saudi and Canada extend beyond the limitations imposed by cultural and social constraints and acts of veiling and unveiling become integral to these moments of transcendence and resistance. Indeed, the veil in Alwarifa seems not to be loaded with religious significance, as a sign of faith, as much as it serves a secular purpose, a symbol of social and psychological states, embodying Aljohara’s uncertainty and the complex experiences of veiling across continents.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.935
Threshold uncertainty score0.988

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.029
GPT teacher head0.267
Teacher spread0.238 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it