Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".