Bibliographic record
Abstract
At a crossroads where Black madness meets white sanism, Black bodyminds perish. What happens, then, at a juncture where white madness meets Blackness? This essay explores this intimate point of contact, focusing on the New York State Lunatic Asylum’s institutional journal, The Opal (1851-1860), and blackface minstrel shows produced by an inmate performance group named Blackbird Minstrels. It examines the tension and dissonance that permeate these cultural productions by white women inmates who appropriated Blackness – in forms of Black ventriloquy and blackface minstrelsy – to create safe spaces for liberating self-expressions. Through racial transgressions, gender negotiations, and madness masquerade, the white women inmates at Utica could work through their hidden thoughts, forbidden feelings, and dangerous desires at the cost of Blackness. Though liberatory, the inmates’ work ultimately reinforced the mutually destructive notion of race and madness, the cultural imagination of which still haunts twenty-first century America where Black mad/mad Black bodyminds are demonized, policed, and obliterated according to the dictates of whiteness. Informed by Mad Studies, Black Disability Studies, and Black Feminism, this essay carries out a historical memory work to shed light on today’s mad lives at the intersections of race, gender, and madness. It grapples with what Toni Morrison calls “the choked representation of an Africanist presence” in white women inmates’ mad narratives. In an attempt to undo the violence of appropriation, the essay uses the white narratives to foreground mad Black/Black mad peoples’ lived realities.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| 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".