Baker Molly Stewart Study Updated — Hotandmean Jade

Example: In a short piece, Baker stages a dinner where a jade bracelet transmits gossip as effectively as a smartphone; the bracelet warms when secrets are spoken nearby, physically manifesting the social heat on the room. The “mean” quality is social: people weaponize the object, and the object, in turn, becomes a character that judges. Molly Stewart (here evoked as a cultural critic and scholar) revisits older scholarship that treated artifacts like jade as static cultural signifiers. Stewart updates the study by applying intersectional, ecological, and postcolonial lenses: she asks not only who owned jade, but who mined it, who profited, and what environments were reshaped to yield it. In Stewart’s updated study, jade’s “heat” is economic—demand that accelerates extraction—and its “meanness” is structural—laws and markets that render laborers invisible.