Consuming Intimacies: Bodies, Labour, Care, and Social Justice - Guest Editors' Introduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The lines between care, paid work, and consumption are increasingly blurring, both conceptually and in everyday practices.More and more people are paying others -often less advantaged persons -to perform personal, often deeply intimate labours that include caring for children, the elderly, and disabled persons; cleaning houses; acting as surrogates; and providing eggs, sperm, and breast milk to create and sustain families.In addition to the growing repertoire of intimate labours, the intimate exchange of body parts is also on the rise as bodily fluids, tissues, and organs are being transformed into consumer products through "body shopping" (Dickenson, 2008).These processes are simultaneously global and local, public and intimate, economic and affective, oppressive and empowering; they create new forms of intimacies but they also offer a great potential for exploitation and social injustice.The title of this special issue, Consuming Intimacies, has a double meaning.Intimacies are "consuming" in that many people care deeply about connecting with and caring for others, yet, increasingly, intimate labours and exchanges are commodified and treated as consumer products.Moreover, there are wide disparities between the geographical location, gender, race, and class of those who provide and those who receive intimate labours, as well as between those whose bodies are commodified and those who can afford to purchase organs, Consuming Intimacies: Bodies, Labour, Care & Social Justice Studies in Social Justice, Volume 10, Issue 2, 194-198, 2016 195 tissues, and fluids.This special issue is produced from a symposium of the same title that was held at Brock University in October 2015, which brought together 47 leading and emerging Canadian and international scholars and artists to present, debate, and explore a wide spectrum of 21 st century intimate labours and their associated economies.The symposium was supported by and connected to the social justice objectives of the Social Justice Research Institute at Brock University.The symposium and outreach activities explored a broad range of critical questions and social justice issues that have arisen from interconnected concepts and practices of intimate labours and exchanges, care, social reproduction, bodies, consumption, and commodification.Symposium participants examined correspondences and divergences between movements and transactions of care work and reproductive labour, on the one hand, and the exchange and sale of body tissues, fluids, and organs, on the other.They explored ways to protect vulnerable individuals and populations from exploitation by asking, for example, when, where, and why forms of intimate labours and exchanges are contentious (Hoeyer, 2013), exploitative (Dickenson, 2013), or "bioviolent" (Moniruzzaman, 2012), who they affect, and in what ways.The symposium featured three internationally renowned keynote speakers:
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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 | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.003 |
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".