Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation develops what I call a “sick theories” approach to the long history of labeling girls, women, and femmes – and their desires – as hysterical, sick, pathological, and in need of a cure. My approach builds on the insight that repressed trauma can lead to chronic illness, which was discovered in the early twentieth century with the emergence of the figure of the hysteric: a girl or woman experiencing inexplicable symptoms, from a persistent cough to full body seizures. Drawing on recent work in trauma studies, I offer a new lens to disability studies by reclaiming the figure of the hysteric, who has been largely neglected in this field. By examining a range of literary and cultural texts, I trace new connections between those who are living with trauma, chronic illness, and pathologized desire, and develop a language for imagining new forms of community and care, which I call “hysterical intimacies.”Each chapter builds on my sick theories approach, outlined in Chapter One, to analyze a different sick girl. Chapter Two looks at Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones to challenge the state’s narrative that the pregnant Black teen is part of an epidemic and reveal new dimensions of state sponsored anti-Black violence. In recognizing teen pregnancy as endemic new modes of community care, that cross species lines, open up. Chapter Three focuses on Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life and Catherine Fatima’s Sludge Utopia, which depict what I call “ugly sex” – sex that both repulses you and gets you off. In embracing this ambivalence, these women refuse to have their desires pathologized. Chapter Four compares archival photographs of hysterics with Instagram selfies by authors Esmé Weijun Wang and Porochista Khakpour to demonstrate how chronically ill women reimagine communal forms of care that reject the neoliberal valorization of the individual. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how trauma and sickness enable new forms of relationality and community. These “hysterical intimacies” make it possible to show up in a world full of systemic violence with all of our trauma and sickness and imagine better worlds to come.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 teacher head, 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".