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 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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".