Disease, Disability, and the Alien Body in the Literature of Sui Sin Far
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
This essay discusses the central role that health and disability prejudice played in the passing of the American and Canadian Chinese exclusion laws, which barred the entry of Chinese laborers from the 1880s through the 1940s. Lawmakers justified these policies in part by referring to scientific and public health reports that characterized Chinese immigrants as “feeble-minded” and prone to sickness and therefore as a threat to the health of white North Americans. Using this historical backdrop as a critical context for interpreting the literature of Sui Sin Far, a founding figure of Asian North American literature, I demonstrate the ways her writings on disease and disability challenge the racism, sexism, and health-related prejudice underlying the exclusion laws. Specifically, she reminds readers through her essays and short fiction that the living and working conditions that awaited immigrants in North America were the more genuine threats to health. Further, she critiques the imposition of white Western medical practices and standards on the bodies of Chinese immigrants, particularly women, and theorizes disability as an opportunity for non-heteronormative social formations among Chinese immigrant women.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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