Bibliographic record
Abstract
Women’s bodies in postcolonial Indian society are interpreted and utilised to serve multiple systems of oppression, as examined in the work of writer Mahasweta Devi. Her short story “Breast-Giver” is about a professional wet-nurse named Jashoda, whose breasts and body are continually exploited until she succumbs to breast cancer. By engaging with several conceptual frameworks, including Marxist, subaltern, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, I examine how the symbolism of Jashoda’s breasts changes throughout Devi’s story. In the first half of the story, Jashoda’s breasts are objectified in sexual and consumerist terms by her husband, while her body is perceived by her employers as a tool of labour. Since she produces a surplus of breast milk for her employers’ children and grandchildren, Jashoda’s exploitation is venerated through frequent comparisons to Hindu goddesses. In the second half of the story, Jashoda’s inability to lactate and her subsequent cancer completely invalidate her existence and reduce her to an expendable and discarded body, especially in the juxtaposition between her desirable breast milk and the abject pus from her cancer sores. Therefore, religious veneration and sexual attention awarded to Jashoda’s breasts are relevant only as long as they can be exploited to produce milk for the capitalist enterprise of her employers. Devi’s story thus uses the imagery of Jashoda’s breasts to conceptualise the effects of the intersecting oppressive systems of patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism on the subaltern woman in postcolonial Indian society.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".