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.