Castration Desire: Less Is More in Global Anglophone Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This interdisciplinary dissertation joins global Anglophone literature with critical theory of several stripes in order to incrementally build, chapter by chapter, an interpretive scheme called “castration desire.” Where the orthodox psychoanalytic account understands castration negatively—to lose the phallus is to lose everything—this dissertation argues for the capacity of “castration” to serve a less-is-more ethos. A longstanding but hitherto unremarked-upon trend in global Anglophone literature reflects precisely this project of pursuing less egoistic modes of thinking and acting, so as to gesture toward a more other-oriented relationality. In place of masculine egoism, Anglophone writers such as Sri Lankan-Canadian Michael Ondaatje, South African-Australian J.M. Coetzee, Japanese-British Kazuo Ishiguro, Chinese-American David Henry Hwang, and Irish-Canadian Emma Donoghue offer prototypes in their characters for generating the less-is-more ethos of castration desire. The normative masculine proclivity for pitting an “I” over and against a world of others speeds an inequitable system of servitude to the phallic few who enjoy privileged place atop a global hierarchy. But, as I explain in later chapters, this system meets its breaking point in the era of human-induced climate change, hence the need for a novel thought-model that could lead to a fundamental reassessment of any number of norming social contracts derived from normative masculine individualism, including those underpinning fossil-fuel-extraction. In addition to providing a novel optic through which to read a diversity of text-types, “castration desire” provides analytical tools for responding to the current apocalyptic track over which the globalized logic of normative masculine individualism otherwise operates.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".