Black Queer Cosmologies, Sonic Geographies, and Embodied Entanglement in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s <i>The Brother/Sister Plays</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the sonic landscape of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s triptych The Brother/Sister Plays, particularly how sound and its absence functions in the plays to evoke and embody the simultaneous precarity and immutability of Black being, and of Black queer being specifically. By thinking through some of the many means of sonic expression which occur throughout these works (in the form of failures and gaps in language, singing and humming, and self-narration and vocal doubling, among others), I explore the linkages the plays perform between embodied experiences and archival histories of Blackness and queerness and sonicity, all of which ultimately offer ontological alternatives to more normative precepts of straightness, visuality, and whiteness. In attending to this intentional and multilateral sonicity – defined by its particular materiality and by its entanglements with dreaming, generationality, failure, embodiment, and temporal and spatial disorientation – I show how The Brother/Sister Plays make use of the world-making capabilities of sound to situate and enact a Black queer (theatrical) world.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".