Disrupting Self-Representations: Confession, ‘Coming-of-Age,’ and Temporality in Queer SWANA Refugee Memoirs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an increasingly hostile global asylum system, queer SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) refugee memoirs make political claims as sites of self-representation. In this paper, I analyse three Canadian-published queer SWANA refugee memoirs– Exiled for Love: The Journey of an Iranian Queer Activist by Arsham Parsi and Marc Colbourne, We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by Samra Habib, and Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali – to show how queer SWANA identities, selfhood, and refugee ‘journeys’ are commodified through the popular ‘coming-of-age’ structure of memoir. This structure is articulated through two interwoven narrative tropes – ‘queer out of placeness’ and ‘refugee displacement’. Utilising a feminist geographic approach, I analyse these tropes to show how queer SWANA refugee memoirs published in the west simultaneously reinforce and disrupt narratives of progress from youth to adulthood, from closeted to out, and from East to west.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".