“You Appear Silent to People Who Are Deaf to What You Say”: Solidarity, Schisms, and Alterity in Immigrant Women’s Political Organizing in Toronto, 1970s-1990s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis considers the connections between the increased migration of racialized women to Canada and the ascendancy of social movements in Toronto from the 1970s to the 1990s. In the mid-1970s, there was a surge of grassroots organizations founded by and for immigrant women in Toronto. They were established to address the distinct needs and experiences of immigrant women where government and preexisting, decidedly hypermasculine, ethnocultural organizations did not. This thesis argues that these organizations, and the individuals associated with them, were fundamentally political. In situating these organizations within the broader progressive political landscape of Toronto, this thesis elucidates the ways in which immigrant women’s political organizing challenged and transformed dominant social movements. In particular, immigrant women’s fraught relationship to the mainstream women’s movement in Toronto is closely examined. I argue that immigrant women organized both within and without the Toronto women’s movement. In their relationship to the women’s movement, immigrant women contested the limited perspective of white feminism by drawing closer attention to class and race. This was most evident within immigrant women’s organizing for reproductive freedom. Additionally, immigrant women organizer’s relationship to the Canadian state is analyzed as a site of struggle which dialectically constrained and sustained their activism. Because immigrant women worked in higher numbers than their Canadian counterparts and often in exploitative sectors, labour became a central issue within their activism. Through their labour organizing, immigrant women forged important alliances with the labour movement. This thesis also attends to the uneven racialization of immigrant women which informed their activism. Immigrant women’s activism offered alternative perspectives and methods of organizing which did not conform to dominant ones. By taking a relational rather than assimilationist or pluralistic approach to the relationship between immigrant women’s organizing and broader social movements, a fuller, more nuanced portrait of the intersections between immigration, gender, race, and social movements can emerge.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".