On the Question of Soul Wounding: Secular Debility, Biopolitics, and Canada's Right to Maim
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jasbir Puar has demonstrated that the targeted debilitation of entire racialized populations embodies a contemporary illustration of colonialism’s machine. For Puar, colonizing states exist as biopolitical assemblages of control, the technologies of which instrumentalize a spectrum of debilities and capacities in the service of neoliberal colonialism, which requires maiming populations who are preconditioned for injury to secure sovereign power. This paper stages a conversation with Jasbir Puar to ask what additional insights might be gained about the relationship between colonialism and debility if critical disability scholarship went beyond a Foucauldian biopolitical analysis of the management of life, death, and debility when theorizing colonial violence. This paper thus reads across postcolonial and anti-colonial thought as well as Indigenous theories of trauma to encourage critical disability studies to expand the horizon of its reading practices when engaging these questions. These approaches, I maintain, provide critical insights into sovereign power that biopolitics cannot, including critical attention to non-secular configurations of settler colonial debility that biopolitical theory misses. I aim to show that a locus of Canada’s colonial sovereignty resides in targeted attacks, or “dis-membering,” forms of Indigenous non-secular transcendent self-consciousness—that is, the sanctioned maiming of Indigenous heterogeneous agencies in the service of neocolonial economic designs. In this sense, theories of metaphysics and violence must also be accounted for when attending to debility, colonialism, and sovereign power.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".