Negotiating Bella Figura: Inside the Childhood Homes of Six Second-Generation Italian-Canadian Women in Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My thesis seeks to explore the spatial experiences of second-generation Italian-Canadian women in Montreal in their childhood homes during the 1970s and 1980s to learn about the gendered domestic environments during their childhood and coming-of-age. By conducting photo-elicitation oral history interviews with six second-generation Italian-Canadian women, I seek to explore the spatial layout and material culture of the homes they grew up in and how the home was a space of interaction and negotiation of two cultures. My thesis argues that bella figura is an underlying ideal that contributes to the gendered facets of these homes, an Italian ideal that prioritizes one’s image in the public eye as it relates to decorum. Focusing on the untouchable upstairs living room as a case study, I argue that this space exemplifies this ideal not only through its spatial qualities and material culture but through its maintenance. This thesis explores how maintenance is gender-coded and historically belongs to the separate sphere of the domestic and, therefore, a woman’s responsibility. I explore an intergenerational tension felt by these women in relation to keeping up with these stereotypes and the gendered ideal of bella figura through their perspective of dual cultural identities. I also seek how acculturation and age affect divergent experiences within my sample and how bella figura has lasting impacts on these women as they matured and had families of their own.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".