Out of the Country, Into the Fire: Late Capitalist Tensions Foreground Lived Experiences of Queer and Trans Flight to Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Flights from rural repression to metropolitan liberation are well-represented in queer and trans media in Canada and the United States (U.S.). Cultural studies scholarship has critiqued media depictions of these geographic movements as aligning with late capitalist ideologies legitimizing urban consumption and naturalizing the metropolis as a queer and trans home as rural places are depicted as incompatible with queer and trans life. However, lived experiences of queer and trans movement from rural places to metropolises have been understudied. The present study explores the lived experiences of queer and trans individuals who relocated from rural places to a Canadian metropolis (Toronto) and considers implications for mental and physical well-being, or health. Drawing from a critical theoretical foundation and implementing a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) methodology, the study draws from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 22 queer and trans individuals who relocated to Toronto from rural places in North America. Study findings illustrated how segmented lived experiences of queer and trans flight were foregrounded by material economic contexts as expressed through late capitalist systems. After reviewing the theoretical foundation, methodology, and relevant literatures in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 explores motivations for leaving a rural home with study findings interpreted via necropolitics, an emerging area of critical theoretical interest. Study participants described leaving declining rural economies that were contextualized within a necropolitical twilight of state neglect that exposed rural communities to deaths of attrition as rural places towed the line between productivity and disposability. Chapter 3 interprets contact with metropolitan places as revealing a cruel optimism whereby the means of a good life were foreclosed by late capitalist crises, e.g. vanishing affordability, declining gayborhoods. Chapter 4 considers how participants related to rural places and communities after moving to Toronto, observing that rural places were rarely left behind for metropolitan utopias. Instead, rural places, communities, and perspectives (much like spectres of Marx) haunted an urban present characterized by late capitalist consumption, as rural homes were increasingly foreclosed by economic exigencies (e.g. rural gentrification). Chapter 5 concludes with a review of key study findings with policy implications (especially for rural places) explored in more depth.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| 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".