The Hidden Life of Things: Commodification, Imperialism, and Environmental Feminism in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental and postcolonial feminists argue that political economy of imperialism alters a community's social interaction with nature and land from a paradigm of the commons to one that treats nature like a commodity. The theoretical and imaginative perspectives represented in their research and activism have made possible an understanding of interconnections of gender, class, and caste exploitation and environmental destruction to an underlying pattern of capitalist accumulation, one that generates intensified commodification of labor and land. In this article, I develop an analysis of Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things as an environmental feminist critique in order to gain greater insight into commodity logic of empire. Indeed, it is my argument that novel's structural principles of nonlinearity, repetition, and layered complexity generate a deeply dialectical view of history, identity, and environment. Central to this narrative project is novel's interrogation of commodity logic that underlies construction of patriarchal ideological formations under capitalist imperialism. That is, novel may be said to be a profound meditation on often confounded ways underlying forces of history and economics are concealed within dominant narratives and habits of thought. The novel contrasts surface meanings of things with underlying realities of historical exploitation, and thus demonstrates how ideological perception is organized but also undermined. In order to fully appreciate novel's work of demystification, my examination of novel develops what might be described as a negative dialectics of environmental feminism to interrogate -- and also to construct alternatives to -- dominant meanings that structure social interaction and relationships with environment.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".