Construction as a Social Process (Fischer Chpt 2)

Question 1

What is a social construct?

Answer 1

a phenomenon or category created and developed by society through its cultural and social practices

Question 2

what do the processes of social construction describe?

Answer 2

the ongoing practices of building a concept or a theory through the collective actuibs if groups, organizations, and institutitions (e.g. science, schools, government, industry)

Question 3

what makes the construction process a social act?

Answer 3

many people participate in the construction process

Question 4

what are truth claims?

Answer 4

assertations that a particular belief system holds to be true

Question 5

Describe how the answer of ‘where do babies come from?’ is socially constructed (how has it changed throughout the years)?

Answer 5

15th century scholars
* assumed only God could create life thus every human who would ever live was already in existence, hidden inside the sperm
* this belief was founded of knowledge of earlier scientists when they saw sperm under the microscope –> sperm were animated because they contained tiny humans waiting to be transferred and incubated by a woman

19th century
* out with religion and more science: knowledge workers such as scientists became prevelant in laying the foundations of sexual knowledge
* using more powerful microscopes –> biologists determined sperm didn’t have tiny humans in them –> theorized that reproduction involved feisty sperm thrusting and penetrating their way into a passive egg to fertilize it
* based on sceintists’ understandings of heterosexual sexual scripts

nowadays
* sperm are small and weak, move side-to-side rather than forwards, and cannot penetrate the much larger eggs –> egg actively chooses a sperm and seizes it with its sticky coating – playing an active role in fertilization
* “femme fatale” trope

Question 6

what do we mean by when we say: 19th century scientific understandings about fertilization (truth claims) were based on understandings of heterosexual sexual scripts?

Answer 6

they were anthropomorphizing sperm and egg as if they were men and women in a conventional heterosexual relationship

Question 7

Give two reasons why the idea that all we see and know is in some way a human invention may be difficult to believe

Answer 7

1. we are taught by people and institutions throughout much of our lives and are told that some things existed before humans had anyhting to do with them (priori) and therefore those things are not human constructions but simply “found” or “discovered”
2. the idea of construction applied to seemungly universal concepts seems arrogantly anthropocentric (human centred)

Question 8

What is the fact-making process?

Answer 8

where new scientific facts are built through scientists’ discussions aka scientific discourse

Question 9

what is a discourse?

Answer 9

systems of thoughts that are composed of ideas, beliefs, and practices that systematically construct the subject matter of which they speak

Question 9

can we ever have perfect reflections of biology or other sciences? why or why not?

Answer 9

no because they require human acitivity to be “discovered” and described, all of the knowledge about them are filtered through cultural beliefs

Question 10

how does the scientific method base truth claims?

Answer 10

based on systematic observations of measurable phenomena

Question 11

what does a sexual discourse describe?

Answer 11

• the many ways in which sex and sexualties are discussed, portrayed, described, understood, framed, etc
• both language and action
• may draw off emprical research, observation, or other strategies
• may be difficult to identify a source, but permeates popular culture

Question 12

what are some techniques that social scientsists use to study sexuality?

Answer 12

1. large-scale surveys
2. interviews
3. ethnographies (participate in the communities they want to study)

Question 13

what is deconstruction?

Answer 13

the process of analyzing and revealing the hidden assumptions, judgments, and values that underlie social arrangments and intellectual ideas

Question 14

what is a common myth that makes it challening to understand constructivism? what is the issue with this myth?

Answer 14

that if something is a social construct then it is not actually real (we conflate “real” with “natural” AND “constructed” with “fake”); to construct something is to make it real

Question 15

does Patricia Hill Collins argue that both/and or either/or frames are more useful for understanding constructivism?

Answer 15

both/and

Question 16

what is categorizing? how are they islands of meaning? is thinking categorically neccessarly bad?

Answer 16

the act of drawing a boundry between one thing and the other

islands of meaning because the determinantation of difference that distinguish between this and that which serve as tools for understanding the world around us

categories are a necessity of human thought, reflection, and communication

Question 17

describe how “sex” is often presented in essentialist terms

Answer 17

assuming one’s “true” sex is rooted in biology, like chromosome patterns or genitalia (it’s aboslute)

Question 18

what is disidentification?

Answer 18

to ignore an idea is ultimately to decontruct it – never mentioning something, never thinking about something, contributes to the decay of any thing or quasi-thing