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| alias | public | slug | title | prev | next |
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| Social Construct | true | social-constructs | Social Constructs | false | false |
Social Constructs
1088 words, ~6 minute read.
Referenced by:
GenderGerrymanderingObjectivityPrescriptivism vs DescriptivismScientific ConstructivismTrans athletes in sportsSocial constructs are concepts with social definitions. Having a "social definition" really just means its some concept or property some group of peoples (or even animals) has prescribed meaning to. You know of and use these all the time throughout your life, and have likely identified some common ones like gender or class. As we'll discuss, however, there are far, far many more social constructs than the ones commonly referred to as such. It should be noted that while these concepts are essentially "made up", in the sense that they are arbitrary distinctions created by imperfect beings, that does not make them "not real". They exist and are typically created for a reason, often convenience. However, those reasons can be analyzed and determined to be more harmful than useful. This article's goal is to discuss and encourage analyzing social constructs, to better identify them and determine their utility and impact on society. Furthermore that it's possible to change or even destroy these constructs, and it's our social duty to do so when appropriate.
With a definition for social constructs as a concept established, how would you go about defining a specific social construct? Well that's tricky, due to social constructs' nature. It's useful to define words using either Prescriptivism or Descriptivism, but social constructs are much too ephemeral and complex to truly be defined using either approach. How would you attempt to make a complete, non-simplified definition of gender, for example? Gender has an impact on all parts of society, with gender roles shaping our entire lives and society and it interacts with various other similarly complicated constructs like class or family. All of this makes these concepts so complex that many incredibly smart people will spend their entire lives just writing about a single construct. While useful, these papers are obviously not the way we are typically introduced to constructs, or how we gain an understanding of them within a complex network of constructs.
Kids effectively "learn" the definitions of social constructs via exposure to them. They don't need to be explicitly outlined, at least not wholly, but rather experienced and lived. Kids observe people performing their gender roles, recognize their family and duties within it, calculate their age by counting the number of birthdays they've had, etc. Humans are powerful at recognizing patterns and through that naturally build an understanding, piece by piece, for all these constructs and how they interact, even if they couldn't formally define any of them. They'll go on to follow the unstated rules of these constructs, reinforcing them and teaching them by demonstration to following generations.
These constructs form a complex web, where any specific construct is only useful in the context of the web it is both a part of and dependent on. For example, knowing what a "bakery" is depends on the concept of a store, which depends on the concept of a building, and which depends on the concept of a structure. And this is just one path we could've taken - we could've alternatively explored bread or employees or shopping, and so on.
Ultimately, constructs are supposed to be useful. They allow us to communicate, understand, and exist within our society. One without any constructs would be impossible to do anything in. But these constructs also gained a lot of meanings during times of oppressive forces taking over the world, and can seriously harm people, particularly with concepts like gender. In the same way these constructs allow us to understand the world around us, they can also mold us to fit those definitions. That's my real motive behind this page - to help recognize these constructs, analyze their utility, and ultimately decide if they're a construct worth continued support.
Some social constructs may seem to have straightforward definitions, but there is nuance and caveats that are still exclusively defined through social means. Take soup, for example. Oxford describes it as "a liquid dish, typically made by boiling meat, fish, or vegetables, etc. in stock or water". Well first off, that "typically" is already a concession that there are some traits that seem common, but not necessary to the definition. Is a bowl of cereal and milk considered soup? How liquid does the base have to be - would spaghetti Os count? And perhaps even a "liquid dish" is a murky requirement itself; let's talk about a game called Something something soup something, which uses gameplay of deciding which of various weird maybe-soups actually counts as soup. Their goal is to reveal through gameplay that "that even an ordinary concept like 'soup' is vague, shifting, impossible to define exhaustively". They released an analysis of results from what people typically considered requirements for "soupyness", and found nearly a third of participants (from focus groups and tracked players) accepted solids like rocks or ice cubes as viable bases for a soup. The oxford definition didn't mention container or utensil used for consuming soup, but the game found 25% of their focus group and 10% of their players considered the container being bowl-like or the utensil spoon-like as important. The point is that these definitions are subjective and learned socially, and thus have blurred edges that can change over time - you won't be able to find a complete definition in any dictionary. And don't even get me started on what a sandwich is!
Similar to how social constructs can have a nice simple definition that doesn't really encapsulate the social definition, the definition of social constructs as "concepts with social definitions" doesn't really explain just how ubiquitous these concepts are . Nearly everything is a social construct; everything from "age" to "bakeries" to "north" to "sandwiches" are social constructs; These concepts that society has built an understanding of over long periods of time, and have been shaped by our shared cultures and values. Even naming those constructs was a social agreement that those concepts are worth pointing out - Why make distinctions between different types of stores? Why distinguish some buildings as stores in the first place? Or call some structures buildings and others, like a fence, not? All of these are social constructs we use to help understand the world, that we learned through our experiences within our given society and culture. They're also all arbitrary and oftentimes you'll see these lines and distinctions differ between peoples. Take color, for example: We have many different colors - red, blue, green, yellow, purple, and so on. But why do we have those specific colors? Why does light red get its own name but not light green? Why is blue a boy color and pink a girl color? Is the dress black and blue or white and gold? Where is the line between dark blue and black? Why does the rainbow only sometimes include an indigo and violet? Well, all these decisions just kinda resolve as society continues to change. Those categories of colors just happened to be the ones our culture uses. But other cultures separate them out in different ways, like caring more about brightness than hue. Some cultures don't even have a concept of color, or might group colors differently than us - like grouping some colors as "like ripe fruit", which may seem just as out of place to us as us grouping green and tan in a category called "camo" would seem out of place to them.
