Economies of Dissimulation: The Western Bourgeois Woman and the Limits of Libidinal Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the politics of desire in the formation of the Western Bourgeois Woman. I argue that this figure belongs to an economy of dissimulation: the circulation and exchange of a generative libidinal power in the symbolic production and commodity consumption of white feminine artifice. Furthermore, I address the problem of how this figure displaces labouring female bodies in an international context. Two theorists whose work both constitutes and organizes the limits of the labour/desire opposition are Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. I am particularly interested in re-reading Marx through Foucault, with an emphasis on the gender and materiality of the body and in re-reading Foucault’s “Marxism,” his attempt to distinguish his theory of sexuality from Marx’s theory of class relations as the privileged 19th-century discourse of historical truth. My approach is to deconstruct the symptomaticity of Marx’s and Foucault’s analytical fields by using the female bourgeois subject as a critical wedge within their respective conceptual schemes. My aim is a transnational and materialist feminist politics of reading that critically challenges labouring and desiring relations of power in colonial, postcolonial and global contexts. This is a partial and provisional attempt to do so by working through an initial theoretical problematic.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".