“I don’t feel like an activist”: Monstrous Subjectivities and the Racial Elsewheres of Queer and Trans “Activism” in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on data collected from my dissertation, this article explores the impacts of western activist ideals on the subjectivities of queer and trans of colour organizers within Toronto, ON. Framing these ideals in terms of what social movement scholars call “the perfect standard of the activist” ( Bobel 2007 ), I argue that western activist discourses assume an exclusionary logic that prevents queer and trans people of colour from claiming the activist identity. However, instead of focusing on what is lost in this prevention, I consider what is gained. I begin with a review of how the folx I spoke to either refused, rejected, or revised the activist identity and argue that what they have is common is a “monstrous” ( Weheliye 2014 , 125) ability to activate subjectivities that are beyond the perfect standard. I locate this ability within the diametrical realm of “the elsewhere” ( Dryden 2018 , 63), and conclude that, within this realm, one can become, what Yao (2021) calls, disaffected from whitestream politics and thus embrace a praxis of wayward resistance that resembles Quashie’s (2012) notion of the quiet: a sense of resistance that is radically mundane and authentically known.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".