Organizing narratives: an exploration through friendship and mourning in women's stories of becoming feminist community organizers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this thesis I explore the stories of nine white, middle-class women, including myself, who have at one time or another identified ourselves, and our work, as feminist community organizers/ing. The thesis began as an attempt to map and analyze feminist organizers as we were coming to terms with the government cuts and ‘restructuring’ in Ontario in the late 1990s. I had in mind a study that could make visible the ways in which a particular group of women responded to neo-liberalism. Soon, however, I began to see that such an approach would take for granted the category ‘feminist community organizer,’ and the ways in which (some) women come to take it up as their/our own. As I listened to the emotional investments in women's stories of ‘un/becoming’ feminist organizers, I felt compelled to take seriously their passionate emotional attachments. The thesis, therefore, has become a critical reflection on the making and un-making of identities in the often ambivalent practices and dynamics of contemporary ‘feminism,’ ‘community’ and ‘organizing.’ Through a post-structuralist feminist lens that makes use of concepts of mourning and friendship, I overlay our conversations with three narrative structures. These narratives illuminate the central themes that we, in the small group convened for the study, use to know ourselves and understand our work: skepticism, radicalism and professionalism. I explore how histories, memories and social location shape the ways we make sense of feminist community organizing and our shifting locations in relation to ‘it.’ I then map how white, middle-class feminist organizing is made possible in excess of binary constructions of good vs. evil, as a practice of friendship and, finally, as an identity produced through an interweaving of secular and sacred representations. I do not propose resolutions to the tensions of white, middle-class activism or ways out of the stories we tell. Instead, I suggest that more complex and varied journeys into and with feminist organizing are essential to our ambivalent desires for anti-oppressive practice.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| 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".