Staging Opposition: Performance and Power in the LGBTQ2+ Movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whereas the LGBTQ2+ movement has made notable gains since its inception, these gains do not reflect the experiences or political priorities of the entire collective. In fact, within the movement there are varied understandings of who ‘we’ are, where ‘we’ should go, and where the sources of our struggles lie. It is this tension between collectivity and fragmentation that guides this dissertation, specifically, I ask, how do intersecting power relations shape the processes whereby we mobilize and strengthen collectivity, engage in consciousness-raising, and advocate for certain political priorities in our protest. Using popular drag and queer cabaret as a case study, my findings contribute to core movement concepts including collective identity, storytelling, ‘free spaces’ and infighting to better explain the tension between collectivity and fragmentation in the LGBTQ2+ movement in Ontario, Canada. Using a combination of field observation, semi-structured interviews, and cultural artifacts I find that intersecting power relations shape drag and queer cabaret in both shared and movement free spaces. Drag and queer cabaret are valuable means of mobilizing and sustaining collectivity as well as consciousness raising; however, failure to address how intersecting power relations shape these processes simultaneously undermines collectivity by introducing hierarches and subsequently fragmenting the movement. Groups that seek to challenge these hierarchies do so in two primary ways. In the case of ‘free spaces,’ queer cabaret groups build intersectional prefigurative politics into their performative protest to expand the narrative of who ‘we’ are. In ‘shared’ movement spaces like Pride—wherein LGBTQ2+ experiences and ideologies vary greatly—marginalized groups use drag and queer cabaret as a form of strategic resistance. Overall this dissertation attests to the need for greater attention to how ‘our’ LGBTQ2+ resistance is situated within larger relations of inequality.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| 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".