Mapping Queer Sexualities: On Sexuality, Space and Belonging in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here (1996) and Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter (2008)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present thesis critically engages with two novels produced by North American writers of Caribbean descent: namely, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here and Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter. More specifically, it offers an intersectional reading of the ways in which queer sexualities re-orient approaches to identity and belonging. Given the spatial turn in literary studies and the fact that both novels take place partly or completely in the postcolonial Caribbean, this study discusses the characters’ homosexuality as complicating questions regarding national identity and cultural belonging. Drawing on intersectional theory, this project places emphasis on sexuality and the manifold identitarian (involving race, gender, class) and spatial factors that condition queer experience. Through a critical approach to Roderick A. Ferguson’s and Rinaldo Walcott’s theoretical works, the current research highlights the complex constructions of queer identities in the distinct Canadian and Caribbean contexts. In my critical reading of Brand’s and Mootoo’s novels, the interrelation of homosexuality and space is renegotiated. The queer experience of Brand’s and Mootoo’s protagonists opposes practices of heteronormativity and intersectional discrimination and invites a re-thinking of homosexuality as interlocking with various identitarian layers and dynamically affected by the characters’ locatedness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".