The Colonial Logics of Exceptionalism: Imperial Feminism in an American and Canadian Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the political rhetoric of Western exceptionalism in both the United States and Canada through two contemporary case studies. The first case study explores the American occupation of Afghanistan and rhetoric that painted this occupation as a mission of liberation for Afghan women. The second case study explores the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, a Conservative piece of legislation that criminalized polygamy at the borders of Canada. In each case study, it reveals the ways in which Muslim women were used as referent objects of protection in projects of imperial feminism that ultimately aimed to cement the colonial logic of Western exceptionalism. It concludes with a reflection on the current state of narratives of Western exceptionalism in both countries studied, revealing the ways in which these narratives ultimately operate to mask the violence of the imperial state against both non-citizens and citizens alike.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.066 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".