Exploring Maternalism: Brigitte Bardot, Baby Seals, and Contemporary Hegemonies of the Female Hero
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Imperial tales of heroic exploration have had long-lasting effects on the construction of colonial landscapes and of hegemonies of masculinity centered on whiteness, physical strength, and endurance. This paper examines the renewal of such heroic polar explorer narratives in recent times, and how recurring stories tend to re-create as well as produce new hegemonies around gender and race. Through a case study of the expedition of Brigitte Bardot on the Canadian ice shield in 1977 with the intent of saving baby seals, this paper looks at neocolonial implications of a contemporary polar expedition narrative as told by a female “hero”. We argue that BB’s story is “maternalist” in that it is symbolically benevolent but reaffirms colonial authority on Inuit lands and practices based on a discourse of moral virtue and emotional care. Interestingly, the framing of seal pups as “babies” has constructed the act of sealing as gendered and motherhood as an important standpoint for both anti-sealing activism and Inuit pro-sealing resistance.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".