Uncanny sex: cloning, photographic vision, and the reproduction of nature
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prospect of cloning human beings is an issue that has taken center-stage in public concern over biotechnology in recent years. While a significant literature has emerged around many of the difficult questions that are raised here, this article argues that cloning also serves as a potent signifier of anxieties over the place of “sex” in the natural order of things. In analyzing this connection, it proposes that the idea of human cloning unsettles us in a way that may profitably be understood in terms of Sigmund Freud's account of the uncanny. To elucidate this claim, the article draws parallels between Roland Barthes’ ontology of photography, Judith Butler's theory of gender melancholia, and the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro. In all three cases, repetitions of sex and death at the limit of knowledge point to the uncanniness of cloning and compel a reassessment of the relation of (hetero)sexual reproduction to our understanding of nature and life.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 it