Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE GIFT IN THE HEART OF LANGUAGE: THE MATERNAL SOURCE OF MEANING Genevieve Vaughan Milan, Italy: Mimesis International 2015 Genevieve Vaughan has published her third book regarding the reality and transformative potential of the Gift economy, a logic and matrix of practices that imply the liberation of all genders. Two examples, among many, must suffice to illustrate the sort of antitheses Vaughan posits in her work: mother is aneconomic (exchange paradigm) vs. mothering is economic (Gift paradigm) ; market creates abundance (exchange paradigm) vs. market creates scarcity (Gift paradigm).The new theory provides solutions to the most urgent need in neoliberal capitalist societies: to overturn the civilizational crises that capitalism and patriarchy have caused with the distortion and appropriation of the Gift. The Gift in the Heart of Language provides sobering and mind-altering perspectives on the Gift economy in all of its manifestations. The Gift has mostly been discussed in sociology and anthropology, and in relation to Indigenous people. Vaughans contribution is to have made its presence visible in many other fields, where it is taken for granted but where it in fact represents the pillar holding societies together. Where French feminism has invented bisexual or feminine writing, Vaughan shows that language itself is at root maternal, not part of the Symbolic, or a symptom of the Law of the Father (Lacan). She shows that The Gift is a more typical matrix of values and worldview among women, but not exclusively so. References to societies still engaged in ecosocially sustainable Gift practices serve to explode the taken-for-granted views claiming that patriarchy and exchange have been universal and without alternative. Vaughan argues that the liberation of The Gift as a matrix of economic and communal values requires an end to exchange, the capitalistic market, and patriarchy. This is necessary in order to (re)create an egalitarian society that will function according to the values that have been appropriated and redirected to serve exchange, ego-oriented homo economicus, and capitalistic accumulation. Gifting within the model of competition, domination, and patriarchal power-over is a contradiction in terms (it goes against its prevailing logic at least among the masters) and it can never bring about a peaceful society. On the other hand, capitalism would not thrive without the free gifts that it appropriates and exploits. The neoliberal market economy is according to Vaughan composed of private property owners or would-be owners and exchangers in the midst of a sea of gifts we do not recognize as such. Vaughans theoretical contribution consists in tackling the blind spots not only of gender studies but all patriarchal scientific fields from linguistics, Marxist theory, child development studies to semiotics and economics at large. Vaughan exposes all the fields which have built their methods and research processes subconsciously or intentioanlly on the biased model of exchange and masculated perspectives represented as neutral and natural. Thanks to feminism, the lgbt movement and the mens movement, many people are already questioning the prevailing gender stereotypes. This new book deserves to be required reading in educational circles, foremost in gender studies, as Vaughan's theories move beyond the second and third waves of feminism to create a wave of their own--beyond performative gender, the misnomer called essentialism, and the disastrous impact of postmodern and neoliberal feminism. Vaughan is right to stress that we will not solve the crises of this era unless we recognize the important economic aspects of mothering as a gendered dimension of epistemology rather than reducing it ideologically to biological essence or nature. Neither eliminating Capitalism while maintaining Patriarchy, nor eliminating Patriarchy while maintaining Capitalism will change the situation. …
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".