Trans Humor, And Resistance: De/Coloniality Of French Humor, And Comedy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Humor has been one of my many tools for me to cope with misgendering, transphobia, anxiety, etc. Sadly, humor and comedy theories in French-speaking contexts have not considered enough the power dynamics that humor can contribute to normalizing, nor ways to deconstruct them. In this thesis, I argue that adding the concept of de/coloniality to the Benign Violation Theory popularized by Warren and McGraw (2010), meaning creating laughter through what will be considered “benign” violations of norms by the audience – namely, by focusing on Decolonial Violations – is a useful way to theorize this gap in relation to brave spaces, meaning spaces where the audience is challenged. This idea can educate outgroups and support ingroups simultaneously and open the Overton window (meaning what is considered acceptable in the mainstream) when used alongside decolonial thought: there is a potential to challenge coloniality and audiences through humor. Through semi-structured interviews, I interviewed 5 French-speaking trans artists (2 non-white artists) and 4 non-performing trans audience (2 non-white audience) from Quebec, France, Belgium, to assess their politicization on the subject, and their view on the potential decolonial, educational, and care aspects of humor in relation to their trans identity. All were very politicized, although most of the non-performer group did not consider themselves “militant” (militant/activist). The notion of how to use humor was very nuanced, some more universalist, and some ready to make no compromises on their art. However, generally, white participants struggled with the larger notion of decoloniality, only seeing it from an individual prism rather than on a collective prism, and how white supremacy and coloniality impacted/could impact them as well, although de/coloniality has impacted/impacts trans non-white folks more. The notion of brave spaces, hence spaces where one’s values/thoughts are challenged, is what seemed to be lacking the most in the French humor sphere, and algorithms and capitalism seem to worsen it.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".