The Language of Pain: Punishment and Intelligibility at the Medical Border
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Borders require subjects to give an account of themselves so they can be formally “recognised” by the State. This recognition determines whether the subject can cross the border, and any conditions placed upon crossing. By tying mobility – which is so often essential to life – to the capacity to get recognized in the “right” way, borders reveal what is at stake in what Judith Butler calls intelligibility. This article explores the problem of intelligibility with respect to the medicalization of borders, where medical knowledge is co-opted to establish border-crossing criteria. Using Australia’s “Medical Evacuation” legislation as a case study, I show how medical borders place an impossible demand on those that come before them: namely, to provide “evidence” of pain and trauma so border crossing can be facilitated, and punishment avoided.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".