Crossing the Line: Censorship, Borders, and the Queer Poetics of Disclosure in English-Canadian Writing, 1967-2000

Since Confederation enshrined Canada Customs’ mandate to seize “indecent and immoral” material, the nation’s borders have served as discursive sites of sexual censorship for the LGBTTQ lives and literatures that cross the line. While the Supreme Court’s decision in Little Sisters v. Canada (2000) upheld the agency’s power to exclude obscenity, the Court found Customs discriminatory in their preemptive seizures of LGBTTQ material. Extrapolating from this case of the state’s failure to sufficiently ‘read’ queer sex at the border, this dissertation moves beyond studies of how obscenity law regulates literary content to posit that LGBTTQ authors innovate aesthetics in response to a complex network of explicit and implicit forms of censorship. The numerous inter- and intra-national border crossings represented by queer writing in Canada correspond with sexual expressions that challenge the Charter’s “reasonable limits,” remaking the discursive boundaries of free speech in Canada. Informed by a range of literary critics, queer theorists, sociologists, and legal scholars, the dissertation examines compositional strategies that appropriate and exceed the practice of censorship in order to theorize what I call a “queer poetics of disclosure.” Chapter One revisits Scott Symons’ pre-liberation novel Place d’Armes (1967) alongside the era’s divergent nationalisms and the imminent decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969. Symons re-maps Montreal in text and illustration and produces metafictional boundaries that challenge subjective definitions of obscenity. Chapter Two considers Contract with the World (1980) by the American-Canadian novelist Jane Rule. Rule’s developing style of multivalent narration, coinciding with her anti-censorship advocacy, articulates an ambivalent, or borderline, model of sexual citizenship. Chapter Three concerns Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s long-poem Double Negative (1988), an experimental narrative of their Australian travels. Marlatt and Warland’s erotic, language-mediated poetics evade both censure and the individualism of free speech discourse by questioning the limits of lyric expression. Chapter Four examines Gregory Scofield’s lyric silences in poetry that asserts a gay Métis subjectivity. Focusing on Native Canadiana (1996), this chapter revisits anxieties of blood and border crossings during the HIV/AIDS crisis in order to draw out the implications of settler-colonial sexual censorship just before the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2000

Curated Reasoning by Formal Modeling of Provenance

The core problem addressed in this research is the current lack of an ability to repurpose and curate scientific data among interdisciplinary scientists within a research enterprise environment. Explosive growth in sensor technology as well as the cost of collecting ocean data and airborne measurements has allowed for exponential increases in scientific data collection as well as substantial enterprise resources required for data collection. There is currently no framework for efficiently curating this scientific data for repurposing or intergenerational use. There are several reasons why this problem has eluded solution to date to include the competitive requirements for funding and publication, multiple vocabularies used among various scientific disciplines, the number of scientific disciplines and the variation among workflow processes, lack of a flexible framework to allow for diversity among vocabularies and data but a unifying approach to exploitation and a lack of affordable computing resources (mostly in past tense now). Addressing this lack of sharing scientific data among interdisciplinary scientists is an exceptionally challenging problem given the need for combination of various vocabularies, maintenance of associated scientific data provenance, requirement to minimize any additional workload being placed on originating data scientist project/time, protect publication/credit to reward scientific creativity and obtaining priority for a long-term goal such as scientific data curation for intergenerational, interdisciplinary scientific problem solving that likely offers the most potential for the highest impact discoveries in the future. This research approach focuses on the core technical problem of formally modeling interdisciplinary scientific data provenance as the enabling and missing component to demonstrate the potential of interdisciplinary scientific data repurposing. This research develops a framework to combine varying vocabularies in a formal manner that allows the provenance information to be used as a key for reasoning to allow manageable curation. The consequence of this research is that it has pioneered an approach of formally modeling provenance within an interdisciplinary research enterprise to demonstrate that intergenerational curation can be aided at the machine level to allow reasoning and repurposing to occur with minimal impact to data collectors and maximum impact to other scientists

Evaluation of cosmic ray rejection algorithms on single-shot exposures

To maximise data output from single-shot astronomical images, the rejection of cosmic rays is important. We present the results of a benchmark trial comparing various cosmic ray rejection algorithms. The procedures assess relative performances and characteristics of the processes in cosmic ray detection, rates of false detections of true objects and the quality of image cleaning and reconstruction. The cosmic ray rejection algorithms developed by Rhoads (2000), van Dokkum (2001), Pych (2004) and the IRAF task xzap by Dickinson are tested using both simulated and real data. It is found that detection efficiency is independent of the density of cosmic rays in an image, being more strongly affected by the density of real objects in the field. As expected, spurious detections and alterations to real data in the cleaning process are also significantly increased by high object densities. We find the Rhoads' linear filtering method to produce the best performance in detection of cosmic ray events, however, the popular van Dokkum algorithm exhibits the highest overall performance in terms of detection and cleaning.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in PAS

Sex bias in tuberculosis in the developing world

Tuberculosis (TB), the most deadly global single organism infectious disease, kills nearly twice as many men as women. Understanding the factors that drive this bias in TB mortality is an important aspect of the global effort to reduce the enormous burden of this disease in the developing world. One third of the world’s population is estimated to be infected TB, with Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) bearing the greatest disease burden. In LMIC sex bias in TB is influenced by sociocultural, behavioural as well as biological factors, with dynamic interactions between reporting variables, other confounding variables and physiological mechanisms, which each influence one another to produce the male-biased sex ratio observed in TB transmission, prevalence and mortality. While confounding factors are addressed in the existing global drive to tackle TB it is the biological aspects of sex bias in TB that present specific challenges for diagnosis and treatment in men and women as they potentially influence future immunological-based interventions to treat TB

A dynamic neural field model of leaky prosody: proof of concept

Recent work has shown that lexical items come to take on the phonetic characteristics of the prosodic environments in which they are typically produced, a phenomenon referred to as "leaky prosody". Focusing on pitch patterns in Mandarin, we show that leaky prosody can be derived from a flat (i.e., non-transformational, non-optimizing) model of speech production. Formalized using Dynamic Field Theory, in our model, lexical, phonological, and prosodic inputs each exert forces on a Dynamic Neural Field representing pitch. Notably, the forces exerted by these inputs reflect surface distributions in a large corpus of spontaneous speech. Our simulations showed that the flat model derives the short timescale effect of prosodic prominence on pitch production as well as the longer timescale effect of leaky prosody. By updating lexical items based on surface phonetic form, words that are consistently produced in high/low prosodic prominence positions take on the phonetic characteristics of those environments

Overlapping Structures in Sensory-Motor Mappings

This paper examines a biologically-inspired representation technique designed for the support of sensory-motor learning in developmental robotics. An interesting feature of the many topographic neural sheets in the brain is that closely packed receptive fields must overlap in order to fully cover a spatial region. This raises interesting scientific questions with engineering implications: e.g. is overlap detrimental? does it have any benefits? This paper examines the effects and properties of overlap between elements arranged in arrays or maps. In particular we investigate how overlap affects the representation and transmission of spatial location information on and between topographic maps. Through a series of experiments we determine the conditions under which overlap offers advantages and identify useful ranges of overlap for building mappings in cognitive robotic systems. Our motivation is to understand the phenomena of overlap in order to provide guidance for application in sensory-motor learning robots