Ageism, Existential and Ontological: Reviewing Approaches toward the Abject with the Help of Millett, Hodgman, Lessing, and Roth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an important and provocative recent article, Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard have linked ageism not only to structural and institutional practices but to deep-seated existential and ontological fears and horrors regarding deep old age, as crystallized in the social imaginary of the fourth age. This concept suggests the need to combat not just the more modifiable structures of ageism but also the murkier and therefore more obdurate cultural aspects, especially the association of deep old age with the abject. In this article, I suggest the writings of George Bataille may help reimagine the frailties, “uglinesses,” and filth associated with deep old age. Exploring literary memoir and fiction by a range of writers through the prism of Bataille’s work, I consider how this new approach to abjection can undermine ageism and also serve as a gateway to a more meaningful vision of both old age and the life course itself.
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.
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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".