"Like a Body Without a Mouth": Representations of Hunger and Fulfilment in Three Canadian Two-Spirit and Transgender Coming-of-Age Novels by Joshua Whitehead, Kai Cheng Thom, and Vivek Shraya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation compares literary techniques in three contemporary coming-of-age novels, which generate forms of multiplicity and intertextuality in order to break free of monolithic categories and cultural frames. These techniques expand categories of genre that counter ideas of a unified Canadian canon, demonstrating that literary production thrives at borders and boundaries of cultural and individual identity, where forms and traditions interpenetrate, sparking new perspectives and positions of subjectivity and collectivity. Two-spirit and transgender people are shown to be creatively engaged at the heart of these spaces, using rage and desire to turn ghostly histories of oppression and trauma toward resilience and healing. Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, and Vivek Shraya’s SHE of the Mountains employ hunger, food, and nourishment as metaphors for the ravenous desiring that emerges from these histories and to suggest possibilities for feeding and satisfying these desires. Layered connections between raw experience and memory within Oji-Cree communal and cultural spaces; a diasporic landscape of hungry ghosts in a syncretic mixture of the Canadian uncanny, the Chinese hungry ghost festival, and Euro-pagan mythical beings; and expansive Indo-Canadian diasporic spaces of interconnection and intertextuality; respectively, offer healing possibilities and counter oppressive systems of containment and transphobia that breed despair. Drawing on Susan Stryker’s positioning of rage as a source of knowledge and healing, José Esteban Muñoz’s work on disidentification as a means to shift cultural frames from within, and Julia Kristeva’s understanding of how the interconnected affective roles of oppressor and oppressed can shift, this work offers avenues for action and healing in the face of transphobic politics and fearmongering, while recognizing that processes of healing are never finished and the internal imprints of past trauma and pain never fully erased.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".