Hybrid constellations: investigating the role of communication technologies in coordinating lesbian mobilities in Montreal, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lesbians’ movement has been constellated across cities and lesbians have long used communication technologies to relay information across dispersed networks. This article brings together perspectives from geography and media studies to examine how communication technologies feature in lesbians’ social organising across the urban space of Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. It does so through interviews with representatives from organisations and individuals who use communication technologies in the development, promotion, and circulation of lesbian events. Findings and analysis reveal that organisers’ actions contribute to, and liaise with, hybrid constellations as connections among fragmented groups and individuals formed through, and reinforced across, digital media and communication technologies as well as interactions in physical space. Organisers contributed to the formation of hybrid constellations through three focal practices: a) using multiple technologies concurrently to draw lines between events and people as stars that knit the constellation together; b) negotiating platform constraints to define events according to fluid and expansive definitions of lesbian identity and to prefigure expectations for physical gatherings; and, c) conducting platformed visibility labour involving negotiation of microcelebrity and algorithmic curation and moderation. This research demonstrates how platforms, as dominant coordinating structures for an identity-based network that is not fixed in space, facilitate but also constrain representation and connection, especially connections across different subject positions united through shared gender or sexual identity. However, if these connections across difference can be forged, hybrid constellations hold potential for resisting heteropatriarchal arrangements of technology and space.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".