Theatrical Representation of Rape Culture in First Nations Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My research investigates the question is: Does the gender of First Nations playwrights play a role in the way societal issues are addressed in First Nations Theatre? I wanted to look specifically at the thematic representation of rape culture in First Nations theatre and did so by analyzing the essay of Ric Knowles and the works of First Nations playwrights. Many researchers have looked at the various purposes of putting rape on stage, and the question of whether rape culture is being represented as a metaphor or a violent material practice is debated over. For my research, I looked at the plays of First Nations playwrights, Tomson Highway and Yvette Nolan and compared their works. I examined the way both playwrights write about rape culture and the language they use to describe it. I learned a great deal about how imperative it is to consider perspective when tackling discourse about rape culture among First Nations plays. The most significant knowledge that I gained was the impact of the playwright's gender on the representation of rape. First Nations men who wrote about rape did so to use rape as a metaphor for European colonization. The First Nations women writers I explored had written about rape as a violent material practice predominant in the First Nations community. These two perspectives had changed the way I looked at the representation of rape because it made me realize that First Nations women are oppressed even within their own community. Though I looked at a few playwrights, and this ideology does not encompass the thought process of all First Nations playwrights, it is my hypothesis that most First Nations men playwrights present rape as a metaphor because they are concerned about depicting European control by using another violent practice to describe what that control is like. Whereas for the Female First Nation Playwrights, they may be more vulnerable to understanding what it feels like to experience sexual violence. The divide between the men and the women playwrights suggests there is a divide in understanding regarding the importance of discussing women's value and worth in the First Nation's community. While one group sees the possibility of metaphor, the other group sees the terrible dangers and hardships associated with sexual violence. This addresses the issue that there may be a hierarchial divide within the First Nations community and that too is being presented on stay through the depictions of rape.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".