Barbie Meets the Bindi: Discursive Constructions of Health among
Bibliographic record
Abstract
emphasizing passivity, docility and uncleanliness all contribute to cultural (mis)understandings of Canadian women of South-Asian background. Such understandings are a part of dominant racist discourses, including “bodily ” discourses related to health. This paper focuses on the discursive constructions of health among ten young, second-generation South-Asian Canadian women from the Ottawa and Toronto areas. In this qualitative study, feminist postcolonialism and poststructuralism are used as a lens through which we analyse and interpret the transcripts of conversations with these women. The results highlight these young women’s discursive constructions of health and particularly how racialized and gendered notions of ‘looking good ’ constitute a crucial element in their understanding of what it is to be ‘healthy. ’ We discuss and conclude on how these young women locate themselves as un/healthy subjects within larger cultural discourses of traditional (white) femininity, heteronormativity and consumption. While recognition of the heterogeneity of women’s lives is becoming more apparent in the health literature, research examining the social and cultural patterning of health, illness and well-being among women is still insipient (Janzen, 1998). Yet, the life experiences of some groups of women seem to differ markedly from those of others and of the female population as a whole. For instance, class position, race and ethnicity intersect with gender to produce variations in gender inequality and social variability in health status among women (Bolaria & Dickson, 2002). Racial minority women are doubly disadvantaged because they may encounter inequality due to their race in addition to sex discrimination. In brief, while we do not know much about the situation, we note that the social and economic differentiation of women tends to produce subgroup differences in health effects and outcomes (Bolaria &
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".