Revisiting Mary O’Brien – Reproductive Consciousness and Liquid Maternity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research note examines feminist theory from socialist feminism through the post-structural turn associated with thinkers like Foucault, Derrida and Butler to neo-materialism, this last noted for its emphasis on the body's materiality as opposed to the subject as a socially constructed or merely linguistic practice. Tracing these theoretical developments is contextualized with respect to theories and concepts such as feminist standpoint theories of epistemology, historical materialism and Baumann's "liquid modernity". I ask: have we lost sight of the strength of feminist structuralism - particularly the effects of capital - in order to accommodate multiple and complex subjectifications associated with gender? Mary O'Brien's reproductive consciousness, her argument that women's consciousness is fundamentally shaped through the different moments related to reproduction, is re-examined in light of recent developments in egg donation and surrogacy. This is not intended as an exercise in romantic longing for some sort of utopian society where femininity is venerated. Rather, it is an exploration of the potential for reproductive consciousness to guide political responses to contemporary problems raised by new reproductive technologies that combine capital and gender in a single dialectic.
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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 | 0.006 |
| 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".