Section#1: Constructing
Categories of Difference
Lecture Slides for Rosenblum
Pages 1-21
The Framework Essay
Section #1 of Sociology 15o is designed to:
-Discuss and consider how categories of difference are constructed and created
-Discuss how these categories of people are seen as significantly different from one
another and how this can affect people’s lives
-What categories of difference?
What does it mean that a category is socially constructed?
Changes across_________ , ________, and ___________.
Constructing Categories of Difference
• Statuses
– Master Status
– Status set
• Are there consequences, both positive and negative, for the
master statuses that individuals occupy?
– Examples?
– Patricia Hill Collins and Intersectionality
Differing Perspectives on
Categorization
• Essentialism
The perspective that reality exists independent of
our perception of it, that we perceive the meaning of the
world rather than construct the meaning.
• From a purely essentialist perspective:
– Knowledge is regarded as objective and independent of mind.
– Categories of race, sex, sexual orientation, social class, and disability
point up significant, empirically verifiable differences between people.
– Racial categories exist apart from any social processes; they are
objective categories of real differences between people.
• Constructionism
•
The perspective that reality cannot be separated from the way
that a culture makes sense of it, that meaning is constructed
through—for example—social, political, legal, religious, and
scientific practices.
•
• From a constructionist perspective:
– Differences between people are created through social processes.
– Difference is created rather than intrinsic to a phenomenon.
– Social processes (political, legal, economic, scientific, and religious
institutions) create differences; determine that some differences are
more important than others; and assign particular meanings to those
differences.
– The way a society defines difference among its members tells us more
about the society than about the people who are being classified.
– Americans are now about equally split between those who hold
essentialist and constructionist views on homosexuality.
Creating Difference
• Naming
– Constructionists pay special attention to the ways and
the circumstances under which people name
themselves and others, as well as to those occasions
when people are grouped together or separated out.
– Language carries powerful symbolic meaning, and
names are an important part of every language and
the categorization of groups of people
• Who are you? What are your master statuses? Do the names
that you use for yourself and others carry meaning, power,
identity, superiority or inferiority?
The Power of Naming in Social
Movements
• Changes in names are often promoted by activists to
demonstrate their resistance to oppression and stigma and
demonstrate their commitment to a new order.
– “Colored” (1800’s) “Negro” (W.E.B. Du Bois) “black” (Black
Power Movement) African American (1980’s political
correctness)
– Homosexual (1900-1960) Gay and Lesbian (1960’s) Queer?
(Socially acceptable)
– Girl Woman
– What is a “Slut Walk”?
– Is it OK for gay people or racial minorities to call each other
names that can also be derogatory?
• What groups have historically had the ability
to name and categorize people?
• How have these categorizations influenced
people’s lives?
Creating Categories of People
• While people or groups may assert names for
themselves, governments have the power to
categorize. The recent history of the United States
Census provides evidence of this process.
• Every census since the first, issued in 1790, has
included a question about race, and has almost never
measured these categories the same
– The social construction of Race
– The power of leaders: The Supreme court and granting
“whiteness”
Aggregating Categories
• Federal identification policies aggregated or combined
non-white Americans into four categories: Hispanics;
American Indians; Blacks; and Asian or Pacific Islanders.
– Problems? Issues? Injustices?
– Positives: Panethnicity-Aggregation has been promoted by
social movements and activist groups.
• What aggregate category of people did the textbook
initially ignore? (Hispanics/Latinos; American Indians;
African American Indians; Pacific Islanders; Middle
Easterners/Arabs)
– Invisibility…
Dichotomizing Categories
• Often, aggregates are created as dichotomies, mutually
exclusive and in opposition to each other. In contemporary
American culture, we tend to treat master status categories
as if they could be broken down into two exclusive and
opposed groups.
–
–
–
–
–
Race
Class
Gender
Sexual Orientation
Disability
• Dichotomization encourages the sense that there are just two
categories of each subgroup, and that everyone fits easily into one or
the other, which often creates an “us” vs. “them” mentality
Dichotomizing Race
• While three racial categories—white, Negro, and
Indian—were identified throughout the 19th
century, and well into the twentieth, all were
located within a white/non-white dichotomy.
– What difference did it make?
• Inclusion in American society hinged on the
classification one received; to be American and
be granted the rights that went along with this
classification, meant to be classified or
categorized as white, literally.
– Supreme Court Decisions-Who is White?