3 White Ink, Family Systems, Forests of Illusion, and Aging: Knots of Passion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.-charlEs baudElairE, "corrEspondancEs" I n this chapter we turn to a set of novels and poems that narrate ordinary lives of migrants in the twentieth century and extraordinary lives of concubines, nuns, and empresses.In genre terms they might be seen as dysfunctional family romances, plucky survival stories, and unrequited love stories among lesbians, gays, and hermaphrodites, albeit those are anachronistic terms."Beings of third kinds" might be a better label for these individuals and their familiars, as they attend to rituals, possessions, and animal transformations; and as they attend to moral and psychological concerns outside conventional morality in the past and present.Our guide is a clinical psychologist, lesbian, and migrant from rapidly changing Singapore to Toronto and Vancouver, where she practices acupuncture as well as clinical psychology, and resorts for herself occasionally to herbal Traditional Chinese Medicine and the I Ching.She guides us through both historical horizons of past and present (and, in a novel to come, the future), as well as through our cultural educations of Anglo-Chinese and Toronto schools, Buddhist and Taoist imperial legacies, and immigration struggles around natal attachments versus having to live and guide parents in the contemporary world.Attuned to psychoanalytical knots -the epigraph to her novel Pulse is from R. D. Laing's Knots (1970), a book of twisting aphoristic examples of psychological, cognitive, and emotional entanglements;1 and the cover of her book depicts a fraying knot -Lydia Kwa's body of texts connect écriture féminine (or writing, gender, and sexual difference) and écriture féminine otherwise (of and beyond contemporary Euro-American feminist categories).It is unlikely that she has not read Helen Cixous, as her poems have references to Sigmund Freud, Mária Török and Nicolas Abraham, Carl Jung, Julia Kristeva, Cathy Caruthers, and other writers of psychoanalytic, deconstruction, and therapeutic literatures, as well as to Woodbridge Hospital in Singapore.2Lydia Kwa's novels -This Place Called Absence (2000), Pulse (2010, revised 2014), The Walking Boy (2005, revised 2018), Oracle Bone (2017), and A Dream Wants Waking (forthcoming) -and two books of poetry -The Colors of Heroines (1994a) and Sinuous (2013) -are about migrant transitions from China to Singapore to Canada.They are about the jouissance (ecstasy out of pain, implicitly or explicitly sexual) in lives bound by social change.They are about echoes of "secrets left behind / I
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".