Age of Iron as a Cultural Text: The Question of Apartheid and the Body
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the interrelationship between the body and politics in J. M. Coetzee's 1990 novel Age ofIron from a cultural studies stand-point. Coetzee uses cancer as a trope for apartheid by way of suggesting theobscenity and fatality of such a system of segregation. Mrs. Curren, dying of cancer, metaphorically stands forthe social and cultural cancer of South Africa under apartheid. Coetzee's work, our argument is, turns out to berelevant not only because of its approach to the socio-historical realities of South Africa under apartheid, butbecause of its cultural conception of the body within a postmodern frame. The body is metaphorically treated asa trope for the body politic. This way, Coetzee establishes a strong relationship between the body and apostmodern, popular culture whereby the body becomes a text inscribed with cultural meanings and servingsociopolitical ends. Against Susan Sontag’s argument that illness is not a metaphor and that metaphoric thinkingis not healthy for the sick in her book Illness as Metaphor, we argue that metaphoric thinking about illness,untruthful as it might be, is still an apt means of sociopolitical commentary since we look at cancer and otherdiseases through an unavoidable metaphorical lens.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".