Fracturing White Feminism: Race, Nation, and Representation at the National Film Board’s New Initiatives in Film Program at Studio D
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the final years of Studio D, the state-funded, feminist film studio at the National Film Board of Canada (1974-1996) during its attempts to deal with the question of racial diversity within a post-multicultural policy Canada. As a national, feminist space, Studio D positioned itself as the cinematic center of the white Canadian women’s movement and their documentaries produced our understanding of the (mainly) white Canadian feminist subject to the exclusion of women of colour and First Nations women. This thesis interrogates the discursive collision between white hegemonic feminism and multicultural policy, specifically with an examination of the case study of the New Initiatives in Film Program (NIF) (1990-1996), the NFB’s first formal attempt to deal with questions of race and gender simultaneously and the representation of racial inequity within the women’s movement, as well as the discursive and historical conditions of the late 1980s/ early 1990s which led to its creation. Using archival documents and primary interviews, I employ the methods of intersectionality and counter-narrative to describe the power/knowledge nexus of white hegemonic feminism within Studio D’s institutional boundaries and the struggles for racial equity that challenged the Second Wave’s myth of a united sisterhood. In examining the successes and failures of NIF, I also demonstrate how grass-roots consciousness-raising by women of colour within the Canadian women’s movement and Studio D eventually paved the way for the NFB’s Special Mandate Team for Cultural Diversity, where the lack of non-Caucasian male filmmakers was finally addressed. I argue that the shifting relationships between notions of feminism, race and nation provide optimism for a radical possibility for transformation within Canadian cultural institutions, where diversity speak can be replaced with a foregrounding of co-existing, multiracial, and collaborative differences.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".