Sustaining Social Inequalities

Question 1

paradox of social inequality

Answer 1

• social stratification systems rely on their persistence on belief systems that justify these inequalities
• fundamentally flawed/have no scientific basis
• are actually extremely damaging and costly to societies

Question 2

ideology

Answer 2

• cultural beliefs that seek to legitimate key interests, justifying social stratification
• cultural patterns evolve over long periods of time
• “key interests” = interests of the wealthy/powerful minority

Question 3

Marx and Engels on ideology

Answer 3

• ideology show the ideas of the ruling class intended to distort/mystify processes of capitalist exploitation

Question 4

ideological state apparatus

Answer 4

• set of institutions that produce and reproduce social states of knowledge
• ex: religious, family, legal, political, cultural…

Question 5

interpellation

Answer 5

• Althusser
• process in which we encounter our culture’s values and internalize them
• ideologies (attitudes towards gender/class/race) are social processes, offering people a particular identity
• play a crucial role in constructing identities and giving us a place in society
• accepting OR NOT accepting culture’s given attitudes places one in a specific relationship with power

Question 5

disgust

Answer 5

• immensely powerful indicator of the interface between the personal and the social
• helps define boundaries between “us” and “them”
• CLASS disgust helps justify middle-class separating themselves from working-class

Question 5

emotions and ideology

Answer 5

• ideology also can determine how we feel
• emotional energy is produced by (and upholds) the social structure
• elicitation of negative emotions is crucial to sustain social divisions
• capitalist ideology relies on the production of ridicule, disgust, shame, etc.

Question 6

class disgust

Answer 6

• casting working-class people as immoral, lying, unable to bring up their children, etc.

Question 7

stigma

Answer 7

• Imogen Tyler
• functions to devalue entire groups of people to fortify social hierarchies and create new opportunities for distributing wealth upwards
• often crafted as a gov’t strategy to accentuate injustices
• classificatory violence

Question 8

stigmatization

Answer 8

• practice that is experienced ‘intimately’ but is enmeshed with wider capitalist structures of social control
• material force, structural form of power
• entangled with histories of oppression

Question 9

hybrid masculinities

Answer 9

• men’s selective incorporation of performances and identity elements associated with marginalized/subordinated masculinities and femininities
• cultural appropriation, distancing from hegemonic masculinity
• OBSCURES gender inequality and further entrenches the systems

Question 10

privilege

Answer 10

• invisible in a sense, as it works best unrecognized
• inequality can only be eradicated at a structural level… micro-aggressions are a symptoms of dominant power relations