Gay Steel Mill: Queer Oral Histories of Deindustrializing Cape Breton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Queer history in Canada has often centred around metropolitan areas, like Toronto and Montreal, usually foregrounding social movements. This means that queer histories of the periphery are often overlooked, and that histories of metropole are taken as representative of the national context. In this thesis, I examine queer oral histories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Through these oral histories I aim to complicate dominant narratives in both queer history and histories of deindustrialization in Canada. Cape Breton is a former steel and coal region in Nova Scotia that underwent a comparatively slow, state-managed deindustrialization in the latter half of the 20th century. Today, like in deindustrialized areas across the world, the “structure of feeling” of industrial life remains, despite plant and mine closure. Often, histories of deindustrialization center around a mythologized white male (and indubitably heterosexual) breadwinner, centering not just workers, but the specific function that masculine industrial labour played in the social reproduction of the Fordist accord in the household. By taking up the life stories of queer people, we can critically examine this centring of the nuclear family in deindustrialization studies. In the first chapter, I offer a theoretical and historiographical intervention arguing for a queer investigation of deindustrialization. In the second chapter, I apply this line of thinking to oral histories of Cape Breton queers, arguing that these narrators’ desires for queer history and queer future are ultimately filtered through the prism of deindustrialization’s half-life.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".