Distinctions of Difference: Race, Queerness, & Homonationalism in Québec Cinema
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Distinctions of Difference: Race, Queerness, & Homonationalism in Québec Cinema Gregory Pablo Rodríguez-Arbolay, PhD Concordia University, 2023 This dissertation examines the distinct intertwining of race, queerness, and homo/nationalism in Québec cinema from 1960 to 2003. It traces important historical shifts in Québec and its cinema industries to frame the symbolic and material conditions of sexual and racial representation. Through the conceptual frameworks of queer of colour critique (Muñoz 1999) and homonationalism (Puar 2007), this dissertation questions how cinema has been used as a homo/nationalist tool to promote the notion of a modern and progressive Québec. It argues that Québec’s narrative of LGBTQ+ inclusion regulates visibility and representation in a manner that obscures queers of colour from its cultural imagination. Chapter 1 examines how the legacies of slavery and colonialism map upon the cultural homophobia of the emergent Québec nationalist project in Claude Jutra’s landmark film, À tout prendre (1963). Chapter 2 traces how the neoliberal collapse of Québec’s nationalist project gave way to new multicultural and sexual politics in Denys Arcand’s celebrated films, Le déclin de l’empire américain (1986) and Les Invasions barbares (2003). Chapter 3 examines the convergence of sexual and multicultural pluralism in Hunt Hoe’s independent film, Seducing Maarya (2000), the first Québec film to spotlight a queer character of colour. These films collectively chart the historical conditions of homonationalism by elucidating significant shifts in the cultural representation of queer(ed) and racialized subjects in late-twentieth-century Québécois cinema. Through illustrating the rise of LGBTQ+ politics in Québec, I frame how sexual nationalism came to converge with cultural imperialism in Québec cinema; and how it centres white homonormative subjects as symbols of Québec’s modernity. The dissertation contends that this progressive framework limits the possibilities for the representation of diverse racialized sexualities. Through films and historical materials, I challenge how Québécois queer people of colour have been rendered largely absent, silent, or tokenized within our cultural imagination. Overall, the dissertation challenges the notion of visibility and representation as a universal strategy for queers of colour to claim political agency and cultural citizenship.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".