Replaying the Past: Queer Canadian Documentary as Counter-Archive
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Archives have traditionally privileged hegemonic and normative histories, often excluding marginalized people and their memories. Emerging after the archival turn of the 1990s, "counter-archival" scholarship appeared in the early 2010s, to expand definitions of "archive" to include a more diverse body of materials and historiographical methods. These alternative processes and repositories, known as a counter-archive, can be a community archival collection, an oral history practice, a curated exhibition, an archival methodology that expresses a non-dominant sensibility, artistic practice, or more. A counter-archive typically speaks to, preserves, or represents non-dominant memories from queer, racialized, diasporic, differently abled, or Indigenous peoples, whose subjectivities may often intersect or overlap. In this thesis, I consider queer Canadian documentary film as a counter-archive, one which is a process to preserve subjective and affective memory, but also as a repository, a living collection which replays these memories. I explore how queer counter-archives use queer cinematic aesthetics, archival artefacts, talking head interviews, voiceover narration and re-enactments to preserve and replay memories of queer subjects who have resisted the pull of heteronormativity, but also how creative preservation practices express the affect, relationality, and subjectivity of queer sensibility. I analyze two queer Canadian documentaries, Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (Dir. Lynne Fernie Aerlynn Weissman, 1992) and Sea in the Blood (Dir. Richard Fung, 2000). Using Muñoz’s queer utopia framework, I explore how counter-archives replay memory to produce queer utopias, visions of a world determined by queer sensibility, a way-finder towards a place charted by self-determined subjectivity.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".