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Record W4407614652 · doi:10.1080/10894160.2025.2461902

Queering the ocean: Li Zishu’s <i>The Island of the Lost Plane</i>

2025· article· en· W4407614652 on OpenAlexaff
Aling Zou

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Lesbian Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicJewish and Middle Eastern Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsQueerNovellaGender studiesSociologyRealmNationalismTrope (literature)NarrativePatriarchyAestheticsHistoryPoliticsLiteratureArtPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

, a novella written by Li Zishu during her time in Europe that has largely gone unnoticed. Through an analysis of the novella's portrayal of queer intimacy between two immigrant women-one a Sinophone Malaysian and the other a Jewish Israeli-this article examines their healing relationship and how it intertwines with the MH370 accident and the novella's use of the ocean as an ecological trope. This analysis highlights Li Zishu's literary intention to address themes of healing violence, and transnationalism, marking a significant departure from the canonized Sinophone Malaysian literature, which predominantly focuses on violence, rainforests, and heteronormative local experiences. My reading draws from the frameworks of queer Sinophone studies while incorporating perspectives from queer ecology, queer intimacy, and queer world-making. I first analyze how the nationalism and patriarchy tied to each character's origins contribute to their marginalization as "others" in Europe, and how their bond forms despite differences in nationality and ethnicity. This dynamic is metaphorically reflected in their first encounter in the UK. I pay particular attention to the narrator's experiences of discrimination in Germany, which are tied to her Sinophone Malaysian identity, particularly in the aftermath of the MH370 disappearance. These experiences reveal how nationalism, shaped by global power dynamics and rooted in origin narratives, subtly manifests as a form of violence imposed upon her. I then further examine the intimacy between the characters within the imagined oceanic space-an alternative realm that holds the potential to address the colonial violence tied to their respective origins and facilitate the healing of their traumas. By highlighting the peaceful and restorative interactions between the two characters, I argue that this imagined space offers a vision of queer world-making: one that envisions sensory, nonhierarchical, and non-patriarchal worlds that challenge heteronormative structures and dominant power relations.

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

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)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
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 score0.502
Threshold uncertainty score0.702

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
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 science0.0010.000
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 head0.031
GPT teacher head0.314
Teacher spread0.283 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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