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Record W4414116416 · doi:10.29173/crossings312

Parasites, Pests, and the Working-Class

2025· article· en· W4414116416 on OpenAlexaff
Zuairia Shahrin

Bibliographic record

VenueCrossings An Undergraduate Arts Journal · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicHousing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDehumanizationAgency (philosophy)Action (physics)Symbol (formal)Space (punctuation)InequalityBiopower

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) offers a scathing critique of class disparity when viewed through the lens of necropolitics, illustrating how the systemic dehumanization of the working class relegates them to conditions akin to “social death.” Through its portrayal of the Kims—an impoverished family infiltrating the affluent Park household—Parasite uses physical spaces, metaphors, and the concept of necropolitics to critique capitalism’s role in perpetuating class stratification. The Kims’ semi-basement apartment, a space marked by environmental toxicity, flooding, and overcrowding, becomes a symbol of their marginalization, reflecting Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, whereby the lives of the poor are governed by forces that dictate who should live and who must die. In contrast, the Parks’ spacious, elevated home symbolizes a stark separation from such precarious conditions. Through this spatial divide, the film demonstrates how capitalism’s structural inequalities push working-class populations into vulnerability, stripping them of agency and dignity. Moreover, Bong’s use of pest metaphors, such as the comparison of the Kims to cockroaches, underscores the dehumanizing effects of this systemic violence. Parasite ultimately presents a dual parasite metaphor: while the Kims rely on the Parks for survival, the Parks, in turn, exploit the Kims’ labor. The violent climax suggests that this mutually parasitic system is unsustainable, as it collapses in on itself, implicating even the wealthy in the systemic violence. By exposing the precariousness of social hierarchies, Parasite serves as a reminder of the shared vulnerabilities that underpin global capitalist systems and the urgent need for collective action to challenge them.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Scholarly communication
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.753
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.029
GPT teacher head0.251
Teacher spread0.222 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueCrossings An Undergraduate Arts JournalSame topicHousing, Finance, and NeoliberalismFrench-language works237,207