“Thank you for the Nurture”: Kinship and Technological Posthumanism in Orphan Black
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper demonstrates how the Canadian science fiction television series Orphan Black explores new modalities of kinship, aligning the social implications of reproductive biotechnologies with queer networks of chosen families. Engaging with the writings of posthumanist thinker Donna Haraway and following the clone protagonists of Orphan Black the series destabilises the tradition of the nuclear family by inviting its viewership to question the driving forces behind biological kinship. Also informed by recent scholarship exploring the intersection between queer families, cultures surrounding Assistive Reproductive Technologies, and the works of José Esteban Muñoz, this paper invites engagements with queerness, under a posthumanist critical framework, as holding an underrepresented ‘utopian’ sociality. Driven by a wider cultural context of eradicated reproductive and bodily autonomy under patriarchal capitalism in North America, the series depicts the chosen family – both genetic and non-genetic – as the true site of liberation, solidarity, and ultimately freedom.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".