Before & After: Plasticity, Plastic Surgery, and Pedro Almodóvar’s <i>The Skin I Live In</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although Pedro Almodóvar is generally celebrated as a champion of gender and sexual “plasticity,” The Skin I Live In raises the possibility that we are less “plastic” than we care to acknowledge. “Plasticity” has emerged as a dominant theoretical concept in these postmodern times – the work of Catherine Malabou has been particularly influential – but Almodóvar’s study of non-consensual gender reassignment surgery challenges the contemporary paradigm. “Plasticity,” the ability of material to receive a new form, is conventionally opposed to “elasticity,” the ability of material to return to an original form. The Skin I Live In testifies to the heteronormative power of the latter. Even plastique, what Malabou terms “destructive” or “explosive” plasticity, is powerless “to cut the tread of life into two or more segments,” to elude the ideological hold of the continuous, self-contained subject.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".