Black Female “Things” in International Law: A Meditation on Saartjie Baartman and Truganini
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through the figures of Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, and Truganini, the “last Tasmanian Aboriginal,” this Chapter explores the contrasts between the historic status of black women as chattel (“not-human” things) and their choices and actions in pursuit of the “things” of importance to them. The “choices” made by these women add complexity to the understanding of the nature of “choice” in international law, with particular relevance to the discussion of “choice” and “consent” in the global struggle against human exploitation. The Chapter also addresses Saartjie Baartman’s and Trugannini’s roles in relation to their contemporaneous and contemporary communities. Their bodies “proved” the scientific bases of “natural” racial hierarchies and subordination. The stories of their exploitation cemented the theoretical foundations of the expansion of positivist theories of international law, and illustrate the co-existence of freedom and enslavement.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".