Refashioning and Reframing: Gender, Agency, and the Body in Jana Sterbak’s Remote Control II
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines Remote Control II (1989), a wearable sculpture by multidisciplinary artist Jana Sterbak. The sculpture references cage crinoline, a popular garment in Europe that was a staple in women’s wardrobes from 1856 until the late 1800s. Visually mimicking a birdcage, the sartorial style prioritized an idealized femininity, enforcing corporeal, cultural, and social control over the female body through immobilization, constriction, and threatening livelihoods. Remote Control II mimics this silhouette with added material and formal elements that highlight the crinoline’s controlling intention. Informed by feminist and queer methodologies and design histories, this thesis argues that Remote Control II is subversive in reappropriating the cage crinoline and transforming the silhouette into one that may offer agency and autonomy. To demonstrate my argument, I analyze the cage crinoline’s history, the broader cultural significance of clothing, and Sterbak’s reinterpretation to highlight how Remote Control II is effective in subverting the cage crinoline’s history through appropriation, material choices, and complicating gendered design elements. This thesis concludes by exploring Remote Control II’s relevance in our contemporary context at a time in which the dress no longer stands for singular femininity.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".