Between matter and meaning: the trope of the <i>Kopftuchmädchen</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent transdisciplinary formations in the humanities, including new materialisms and ANT, but also in black studies, are recalibrating our understanding of the human and the posthuman as categories of analysis. They have revealed the post-Enlightenment conceptualisation of the universal human to be both epistemologically untenable and violently Eurocentric, and furthermore laid bare how techniques of differentiation along axes of gender, race, sexuality, religion always also serve to institute the human and its nonhuman, posthuman, more-than-human, less-than-human counter parts. Theorising the material-semiotic figuration inhering in the German compound noun ‘Kopftuchmädchen’ (headscarfgirl) – a term that emerged out of and has become synecdotal for anti-Muslim public discourse – this article proposes that the human and the posthuman should be understood as structuring objects and subjects of knowledge in the study of Orientalism. After all, most contemporary Orientalisms mark cultural difference as a grander problem of (intra)human difference, one distinguishing between a (Western) culture of universal humanity and an (Orientalised) culture of problematic posthuman entanglement. The afore-mentioned compound noun points to a self-referential entanglement of matter and meaning that Occidentalises that which it posits as Universal Human and Orientalises its human-nonhuman Other, while thereby also concealing, in Latourian terms, ‘the West’s’ own nonmodern, human-nonhuman constitution(s).
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".