Packaging of Identity and Identifiable Packages: A study of women–commodity negotiation through product packaging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the age of post-Fordist flexible production, a consumer realizes her/his identity in part through the act of consumption. The visual aspect of commodity–consumer negotiation acquires importance, as commodities must be visually differentiated to attract the gaze of a particular consuming group. The act of visual differentiation is achieved through symbolic packaging, which creates a cognitive link between commodity and consumer. I draw from Baudrillard, who states that in postmodern consumption the sign value of products becomes more important than their actual usefulness (use value). Baudrillard, however, overlooks the importance of gender, race and space in this visual mediation. Through an empirical study of the packaging of women's skin and hair products in two different stores catering to two different income groups in Worcester, Massachusetts, I indicate how gendered identities that are created are complex, porous and materially rooted in space. The geographic situatedness of the exercise checks overgeneralizations allowing it to be studied as an object–subject mediation in a particular spatial context.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".