Maps of gender and imperialism in travel writing by Anna Jameson, Mina Hubbard, and Margaret Laurence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is an analysis of writings and illustrative material by Canadian travel writers Anna Jameson, Mina Hubbard, and Margaret Laurence, that attempts to reconcile the masculinist focus of postcolonial criticism and the charges of cultural imperialism levied against feminist criticism with the role postcolonial and feminist theories play in understanding women's travel narratives. I argue that Jameson's 1838 Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Hubbard's 1908 A Woman's Way through Unknown Labrador, and Laurence's 1963 The Prophet's Camel Bell provide maps of the political, cultural, and physical features of the areas through which the women travelled, and of their own social and cultural positions. Their mapping is also done through more graphic media---including Hubbard's cartographic work, Hubbard's and Laurence's photographs, and Jameson's unpublished sketches---which reflect and complicate the written negotiations of gender and imperialism in which the three women engage. Because my aim is to reconcile theoretical contradictions, I examine in detail books that clearly dramatize colonialist or anti-imperialist approaches and considerations or exemplifications of issues of gender. Not surprisingly, the three writers draw very different maps of those subjects, as a function of their disparate geographical and historical contexts. This study reveals, however, that the maps themselves are drawn with similar tools, which include an anti-racist philosophy and an acute awareness of women's position in their own and the visited societies. Thus Jameson makes philosophical connections between mid-nineteenth-century feminist and anti-racist theoretical approaches; Hubbard provides insights into an early twentieth-century woman traveller's relationship to First Nations men who have both more and less power than she; and Laurence serves as a witness to and astute reporter on oppression of mid-twentieth century women by specific colonial and patriarchal forces.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".