Reading, Evaluating and Commemorating Feminism : Excluding and Reviving Dynamics of L'Euguélionne’s Reception in Québec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My doctoral research relies on the premise that political books are more than a receptacle of movement ideas. They are texts that reveal and put words on felt oppression; they are works that resist artistic norms and often challenges literary institutions; and they are objects that can garner solidarity amongst readers and nurture one’s connection to the movement. In other words, I understand political books – reading them, evaluating them, commemorating them – as a way in which culture shapes our political imagination. Québec's feminist novel L’Euguélionne is a good example of this type of political book. Published in 1976 as Louky Bersianik’s debut novel, it was a critically acclaimed and best-selling book that also received vitriol for its ideological commitments. Over time, it became a forgotten classic known only amongst small reception communities, until 2016, when a new feminist bookstore borrowed its name. Using L’Euguélionne as a point of departure, my doctoral research traces the cultural trajectory of this feminist artistic production to enhance our understanding about the ways in which feminist ideas are critiqued and undermined, but also circulated and kept alive. The dissertation raises three central questions: How is feminist art received by masculine gatekeepers of art worlds? What does the reception and revival of feminist art make possible for activists as they attempt to renew the movement? How does friendship shape intergenerational transmission of feminist art? Methodologically, my approach to the study of L’Euguélionne proposes to consider reception like ethnographers would a city sidewalk (Duneier 1999) or an Argentinian neighbourhood (Auyero 2015). This involves looking at the complex dynamics that characterize the site, what I term the push and pull of cultural reception, mapping the connections between actors, and paying close attention to forms of activism that happen under the radar. This approach complements more conventional studies of cultural reception and could be used by scholars interested in how critical appraisal of political art shapes public discourse about social movements, how consumption of art can fuel activism, and how consecration affects the diffusion of political ideas and shapes intergenerational movement dynamics.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".