“Forever Unliving and Yet Never Dead”: The Queerly Ecological Hauntings of Nathalie Claude’s <i>The Salon Automaton</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At first, Nathalie Claude’s The Salon Automaton: A Play for One Flesh-and-Blood Actress and Three Automatons (2008) seems to be a strikingly anti-ecological play. Following a long tradition of automata performance, the play depicts the ongoing failures of three androids to performatively pass as human in ways that venerate human supremacy and distance humans from non-human nature. However, in this article I will argue that The Salon Automaton’ s uncanny evocation of automata performance history lends itself to a queer ecological reading. Concerned with the intimate interplay between illness, isolation, inspiration, interconnection, and interactivity, Claude’s performance uses uncanny enactments to break down dualist distinctions between human and non-human, natural and unnatural. In the wake of this Cartesian catastrophe, a distinctly queer ecology emerges. Queer ecologies are critical of the political project through which non-human Nature has been constructed, maintained, and policed, and they are curious as to what weird forms of queer nature and ecological politics might emerge when in/human and un/natural meld. I propose that The Salon Automaton’ s “ghosts in the machines” disrupt their anthropocentric inheritance while instead prompting us to attend to emergent queer ecological hauntings – the performative-yet-material enactments that re-attune us to the always already un/natural in/human interconnections in which we are embedded.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".