1 text for class on Feb 26th

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOK1tKFFIQI
This video tells me a little bit about depression and the history of it. I feel that will be the best determiner to analyze for my presentation

Miller Blog 6

Proposal

                I am going to be looking at the othered community of people “living with depression”. I chose this group of people because I personally have been a part of this group and have had people think of me as different and weird. I think people don’t understand that this is a real mental illness and they don’t understand all the issues that come with dealing with a mental illness such as depression. Through this project I want to get the word out to people about this disease.

                I think I will look at texts about the group because there are so many researches done about the symptoms and the treatment available. I also can call upon my own experiences with depression. I want to use research done about depression because that is what people don’t understand. They make assumptions about the disease.

                I am thinking about having specific research from medical websites as well as videos and my personal experience, so I am able to get the word out about this disease. I have two resources specifically that I want to use but as of how I am going to start this project, I don’t have an idea right now.

                These are the two resources I have so far: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/depression/index.shtml

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/basics/definition/con-20032977 

Miller Blog 5

Social Construction

                Social Construction was all over in these articles, which I am sure was the point in reading them. Hanfler says that social constructivist’s theory is “in other word, deviance is not automatically understood as an objective fact but as constructed and interpreted meanings that are subject to change” (13). In my words that means that social construction is a learned belief that a society has about a group of community of people but is able to be changed whenever the dominate society feels it needs to be.

We saw this definition stand out in both the Lorber and the young article. Lorber states this about gendering “Gendering is done from birth, constantly and by everyone, we have to look not only at the way individuals experience gender but at gender as a social institution.” (55) Gender is a social constructed concept. We teach our young children that this is what girls are supposed to act like and this is what guys are supposed to act like. Guys are not to play with Barbie’s because that is a girly thing to do. We put gender into a box and we (as a society) say that if you are doing what the opposite gender is supposed to do you are not “correct,” you are not performing gender correctly. “Doing gender correctly” is a social construction that we have imposed on our young children and as they grow up they are exposed to the same gender construction that they were introduced to from the beginning.

                I appreciate how young says that language is also a socially constructed concept. Young states “But don’t nobody’s language dialect, or style make them “vulnerable to prejudice. “It’s ATTITUDES. It be the way folks with some power perceive other people language.”” (110) This is a huge example of social construction. Our society says if you don’t speak “standard” (which really means the white prestige way of speaking) you are to be looked down upon and looked as lower in education because you don’t know “how to talk”. Society tells us what behavior is to be looked to as “good” and what is to be looked at as “bad”.

                Right now I look at social construction as the “rules and regulations” that society sets for us and that we tend to follow along with. I have seen this in my own life with the dialects that Young was talking about. If someone comes up to me saying “yo I be diggin’ you” (bad example but I have heard this), I automatically think they are less educated than I am. This is what society is telling me, but in reality that is not the case. As I learned in Linguistics, every language dialect has rules and regulations it follows and all are created equal.

                I also agree with Lorber, from the beginning we see girls are dressed in pink and boys in blue and if that is not happening we automatically are judging those parents. When I was younger, I used to hang out with a little boy and we used to paint each other’s nails. Everyone always called him “gay” and I couldn’t figure out why. It was because we were stepping outside of our socially constructed genders which made us “other”.  I have read this article by Lorber before but every time I read it I look back and find a different example of how socially constructed “gender” was as I was growing up and how that became my reality today.