Social and Cultural Constructions

Judith Butler argues that gender is a performative cultural construction; this analysis is taken to further means of discussion in reference to the revelation of sex and gender as both cultural and social constructions. Sex and gender appear as a result of heteornormative regulations imposed onto social actors, arguing that these constructions are essences naturally attached to the human body. The constructions of the sex/gender system are inflicted by a regulative discourse. In the heterocentric society this discursive control is implemented through social norms which enforce male with masculinity and female with femininity. Through various analyses of contra-hegemonic cultural and artistic productions, this thesis focuses on the deconstruction of the heteronormative discourse. The artists and theorists whose critiques and performances are analyzed reveal a fluidity in the defected social and cultural constructions of sex and gender. These categories are dismantled through the same discourse that maintains them as normative essences by a means of collectivity through a multitude of voices and experiences. Itziar Ziga (Spain) and Sayak Valencia (Mexico) utilize the discursive power as a tool of deconstruction to portray various examples of the flawed naturalness that society depicts as rigid. Through the use of blogs, a resistance is established against the normative impositions by way of queer activism. The blogs, Parole de Queer (Spain) and Potencia Tortillera (Argentina), publish the works of individuals which the heterocentric regime classifies as social deviants. By demonstrating that sex and gender are not naturally appended to individuals and their bodies the dissident voices that appear in this work articulate a counterargument to the heteronormative discourse. A resistance to heterosexual control is highlighted within this thesis by engaging in a discussion with these constructions through means of bodily demonstrations and performances.

Social and Cultural Construction of Urinary Incontinence among Korean American Elderly Women

This article looks at the period from the victory of the October Revolution in Russia to the implementation of the New Economic Policy, and aims to make people more accurately understand the importance of cultural leadership in the construction of socialism by studying Lenin's cultural construction on how to build socialism in backward countries. Based on this, the article further explores the important enlightenment and reference significance of Lenin’s cultural leadership construction thoughts on the construction of the cultural leadership of the Communist Party of China, and under the background of socialism with Chinese characteristics entering a new era, discusses the invasion of western values and the diversification of domestic social trends of thought, how should the Chinese Communist Party firmly grasp the ideological leadership and strengthen the construction of ideological discourse power.

In 1983 the New York artist Barbara Kruger released a photomontage showing the face of a female model, resting on a grassy background, with her eyes closed and covered by two leaves. Kruger completed the piece by adding the statement, “We won’t play nature to your culture.” In many ways, this image marked a turning point in America’s popular and intellectual response to the issue of the environment. Twenty-one years earlier, in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had launched a new era in the environmentalist movement, prompting many Americans to begin associating their own physical health with that of the environment. But whereas the publication of Silent Spring and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970 contributed to a far-reaching shift in the ways both scholars and laypersons thought about the practical implications of humanity’s physical engagement with nature, Kruger’s statement represented yet another approach to considering this relationship.

The classical canons of literature create and consider the construction of women as objects of beauty and desire, who are motivated by no concern for themselves, inherently weak and impoverished. This study seeks an alternative narrative structure to such cultural constructions by exploring how Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) portrays and represents the female body in connection with female agency and power by writing against classical representations. Accordingly, this study employs recent theorists who blend feminist perspectives with theories based on the body including Elizabeth Grosz, Susan Bordo and Kim Chernin along with feminist literary critics including Simone de Beauvoir and Linda Hutcheon. By incorporating feminist theory and body politics together with literary criticism, this study presents a discourse of resistance and the potentiality of a new meeting point for shared experience and a common knowledge. In this regard, Atwood’s The Edible Woman suggests that there is agency and power to be attained through the knowledge of our bodies. As a counter-narrative, The Edible Woman promotes a resistance to dominant cultural and social constructions that proceed to objectify and undervalue the female body. Atwood’s novel attempts to bring a credibility and a value to knowledge to which we gain through our corporeal experience. What emerges from this perception is that corporeal knowledge appears to be essential to be able to acquire an understanding of our existence as well as to be read as a means to resistance.

The main focus of the article is on the inadequacy of state responses in eliminating gender-based violence in its structural and direct expressions. The article departs from the premise that gender, sexuality, and identity are cultural constructs and argues that culture and social constructs are dynamic and changing, hence state responses to eliminate gender-based violence must engage the positive and egalitarian aspects of African culture for social legitimacy. While acknowledging that constitutional and legal frameworks lay a normative foundational basis for protection against gender-based violence, the effectiveness of these frameworks must be measured through implementation. It is in the implementation of the constitutional and legal norms that cultural contestations emerge, for instance, in the context of structural forms of gender-based violence such as female genital mutilation and marital rape. The main question that the article seeks to answer is how states can bridge the gap between norms and implementation which arises out of cultural contestations. Focusing on Kenya as a case study, the article examines state responses to structural forms of gender-based violence, specifically, female genital mutilation and marital rape. The Kenyan constitutional framework recognises culture as the foundation of the nation and the right to culture in the Bill of Rights, and on equal footing embraces egalitarian principles which place dignity, freedom, and equality at the core of societal relations. Applying doctrinal research methodology, we analyse case law on female genital mutilation and legislative initiatives in the prohibition of marital rape to identify and distil the judicial and legislative approaches on the interplay between the prohibition of gender-based violence norms and culture. Based on this, the article suggests proposals on how the progressive aspects of African culture that resonate with the egalitarian constitutional structure can be engaged in state responses to gender-based violence.

Just Doing Your Job: Some Lessons of the Sokal Affair Bruce Robbins (bio) The December 3, 1996 issue of the French left-wing newspaper Libération contains a full-page article, plus photograph and interview, devoted to Alan Sokal’s hoax in Social Text and the media coverage that has followed. The article begins like this: “‘Does reality exist?’ It’s difficult to believe, but for the past six months, the American intellectual left has been gorging itself on the question.” This is not an even approximately accurate account of the Sokal affair—no one in this argument has in fact taken the position that reality does not exist—but it is a representative sample of how scrupulously journalists have reported it, in the U.S. as well as abroad, on the left as well as elsewhere on the political spectrum. That’s a load of inaccuracy to crawl out from under. And these are the people who complain that others don’t respect standards of evidence! As the journalists will sometimes tell you off the record, they are “just doing their job.” Perhaps it’s in the nature of their job that they need not worry whether anyone remembers the provenance of this excuse. But it would be too easy simply to blame either them or their profession. After all, the professional deformation is not all on their side. Asked how it feels to know he has provoked this avalanche of malicious half-truths and outright misrepresentations, Alan Sokal could of course respond that it’s not his field, not the point he wanted to make about science studies, not his responsibility. As a physicist, should he have been required to consider what the media would do with his stunt? What are a physicist’s responsibilities in or to the public sphere? (This is of course one of the questions that science studies was attempting to bring to the public’s attention when the hoax came along and diverted that attention elsewhere.) But in addition to being a physicist, Sokal has also declared himself a leftist. As a leftist, he could surely be expected to weigh the likely consequences—consequences not just for the quantity of his email correspondence and lecture invitations, but for untenured, highly vulnerable students of culture around the country, some of whom are already seeing their projects endangered and their reappointments blocked in a gathering backlash. Still, to appeal to politics is not to [End Page 467] end the discussion. For Social Text, too—and it’s also our mistake that has brought discredit on the work of so many other practitioners of cultural politics—a certain obscurity lingers over the question of how responsibilities to politics and to everyday academic business are supposed to be balanced or reconciled. Toward the beginning of Sokal’s essay, there is a little sentence which goes as follows: “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” To the best of my knowledge, no one on the Social Text collective believes this. After more than a decade of editorial meetings, I can’t think of anyone who is entirely comfortable within the constructivist paradigm, anyone who doesn’t bump up against its limits with every intellectual move they make. Andrew Ross’s largely unread introduction to the largely unread science wars issue does what it can to move the focus away from epistemology to matters like the politics of funding and agenda-setting, and I think that’s both right and more characteristic of the journal. For years I’ve been using Diana Fuss’s Essentially Speaking (1989) to tell incoming graduate students they cannot assume they are doing anything intellectually or politically significant by sole virtue of showing that something is a social construct, since saying that X is a social or cultural construct only displaces the “reality” question from the X and onto the “society” or the “culture” that’s supposedly doing the constructing. The papers I want from my students, and the submissions we have tended to welcome for Social Text, have the tact or savvy to acknowledge the potential interpretive regress (what constructs “society” and “culture”? and so...

Getting Personal: The Art of Autoethnography

This chapter shows that students will discover and dissect social and cultural constructs that impact a selected group of historically marginalized individuals. The target population for this activity is counseling graduate students who are in a social and cultural diversity course and who are aware of the definition and role of counselors as advocates. The chapter provides this activity for students who are gaining awareness of the social and cultural constructs that impact the power and privilege of individuals. This activity is conducted by individual students and then presented to the entire class. Therefore, this would work with classes of all sizes. Instructors will first facilitate a lecture and discussion about societal and cultural constructs and how they can impact individuals. After all students have presented their paper to the class, instructors can facilitate a discussion about what students have learned.

The fact that Indonesia adopts many programs from American popular culture, especially the situation comedy format, makes reruns and reduplications at the national level, and makes them into primetime programs on most of the private television at stations demonstrates the strength of American cultural influence in Indonesia. Although, there are differences and adjustments in some parts of the program, modifying to the culture and customs of the people of Indonesia. The question arises, whether the entertainment producers in Indonesia nowadays were deliberately imitating and duplicating some imported variety and comedy format for the sake of popularity in public television in Indonesia or whether the traditional format of comedy in Indonesia is now being replaced with variety and comedy formats imported from America.This study is carried out in the framework of American Studies. To carry out the analysis, the writer made use of the grounded research and comparative study approach and Stuart Hall's theory of representation, to see the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience as an active part of the media consumption and how audience members make meanings and understand reality through their use of cultural symbols in both print and visual media. The object of the study is limited to the representation in Friends, as an example of an American sitcom, and to the representation in four Indonesian sitcoms, namely Keluarga Masa Kini, Tetangga Masa Gitu, Saya Terima Nikahnya and The East.The findings of selected episodes in Friends and Indonesian sitcoms, indicate some similarities and differences towards the trends that sitcoms have used. It is likely that American and Indonesian sitcoms use almost the same conventions of sitcom narrative, but, they also show some differences towards the content of the show, several changes and transformations in the narrative structures can be seen, especially in terms of the locality of each sitcom in depicting the values from the social and cultural construction where the sitcom is made. Another important thing to be taken into account is the way each society has a different construction of gender roles and sexuality, family values and so on, that lead to a different cultural product although they use and share the same conventions and characteristics of the sitcom.Keywords: sitcom, representation, social construction, gender, family

Contemporary studies commonly stress the belief that, even if sex is biologically determined, gender by contrast is a social and cultural construct (Sofaer and Sørensen, 2012). Even biological sex entails varying degrees of male and female attributes in terms of chromosomes and DNA if not in terms of reproductive organs, so that, contrary to the bipolar model of sex, contemporary studies of gender tend to think in terms of a spectrum that includes composite gender or a third gender that is neither male nor female in what Arnold (2006: 155) described as ‘a suprabinary gender system’. In the case of the Byzantine eunuchs or the Indian hijra cited by Croucher (2012: 174–5), these could be regarded as socially constructed, and it is not here suggested that such categories existed in Iron Age Britain or Europe. It is important, however, to be clear that conventional western sexual stereotypes and conceptions of gender roles in child-rearing, food production, and warfare, for example, need not have pertained in non-classical societies in antiquity. Gender issues in the study of funerary archaeology have gained a prominence in the last twenty years not simply as a result of theoretical considerations but also because of more intensive interest in osteological research, as a result of which there has been a greater recognition of the fact that identifying sex may involve evaluation of a spectrum of criteria rather than simple bipolar options. Though pelvic bones remain crucial to assessing sex, the skull and other major bones can also be indicative, and not infrequently the evidence remains equivocal, even where the skeleton is reasonably well preserved. Accordingly, some of the skeletons from the eastern Yorkshire cemeteries were deemed to show ‘contra’ indications, that is male and female characteristics in equal measure, in a gradation of assessment that also included ‘definite’, ‘probable’, and ‘possible’ identifications (Stead, 1991). Furthermore, though sex is biologically determined, osteology may be affected by cultural factors such as the degree of physical exercise that the individual habitually engages in, so that the criteria observed by the osteologist may suggest a physique normally associated with the opposite sex.

The abiding strength of the IPE literature on finance is that it focuses so clearly on the political, social and cultural construction of financial markets. (1) It suggests that financial markets are politically constructed insofar as the pattern of regulation to which they are subjected reflects the dominant macroeconomic ideas to which political elites have adapted (e.g., Blyth 2002; Ryner 2002). Governments always have a choice about which regulatory stance to adopt, but that choice is itself mediated by the prevailing framework of ideas (e.g., Hay and Rosamond 2002; Best and Widmaier 2006). (2) It suggests that financial markets are socially constructed insofar as they could not operate without a sufficient flow of savings arising from society (e.g., Martin 1999; Clark 2003; Sinclair 2005). At heart, the ‘money’ which propels the pricing structure of financial markets is a complex social relation bound up in the practices of the credit economy, where what flows between one person and another — obligant and claimant — is nothing more real than the promise to pay (e.g., Ingham 1996; Woodruff 1999). (3) It also suggests that financial markets are culturally constructed insofar as their current operating logic is entirely dependent on societal inculcation of a particular understanding of risk and uncertainty (e.g., Baker 2002; de Goede 2005).

OpeningThe theory and practice of contemporary African writing has given new meanings and prominence to the concept of Africanity. One of my concerns is to explain whether being African writer is a question of nationality, race or colour. The notion of Africanity raises obvious issues: can a book be considered African because of its setting, or is it the writer's perspectives and world-view are the defining factors? These questions prompt consideration of the idea of alterity or the politics of difference,1 and of feminist questions regarding the mapping of this.Blunt and Rose's feminist questioning of the mapping of space and difference in relation to Western men and women provides the foundation for my engagement with the literary theorizing of African feminism. However, I do not draw on the element of universalism in Western feminisms and the associated denial of differences/boundaries among women prohibits the possibility of transgression. Rather, I explore how Davies, Ogundipe-Leslie, and Boehmer demonstrate and theorize space and differences in ways are pertinent to African women/feminism, with due acknowledgement of African women's boundary-crossings in the literary texts under review.As already indicated in the above Introduction, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has developed a theory of ?Signification' centres on the existence of African approach to writing and performance signifies in a different manner from which is operative in the Westem/European literary tradition. Gates's theorizing of African folk tales prompts examination of how writing for children signifies to both women and children. By applying aspects of Gates's theory to Kimenye and Macgoye's writing for children, I hope to show how their writing transgresses boundaries through the process of Signifying). Further along below, I delineate the aspects of Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Robert J.C. Young's theorizing inform my framework. While wholly engaging with these literary theories, the combination of writers and their works suggests interweaving of differing theoretical approaches. Hence my own approach is grounded in Zora Neale Hurston's method of going a piece of the way with them,2 and engagement with Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the contact zone, which she defmes as an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctives, and whose trajectories now intersect.3 The resultant polyphony of voices enables the contestation of a variety of positions and a multiplicity of readings. To support my arguments, I will be engaging with other current theorists working in the areas of postcolonial literary theory and African feminism.Literary Identity and the African WriterTo echo Kwame Anthony Appiah, it is important to establish from the outset notions surrounding identity are social and cultural constructs.4 Like Appiah, I believe that a biologically-rooted conception of race is both dangerous in practice and misleading in theory: African unity, African identity, need securer foundations than race.5 As with notions surrounding identity, ?race' is also a social construct. Nineteenth- and earfy-twentieth-century European scientific thinking, which specified supposedly distinct biological types, supported and reinforced differences between races.6 Consequently, the concept of race' leads to racial hierarchy because, although it is now discredited as a meaningful biological category, contemporary understandings of ?race' carry the trace of early scientific thinking.7 The notion of differences relating to black people in comparison with white people, for example, are informed by biological and other forms of determinism (intrinsic ability, character) whereby it is assumed the skin you are bom with determines your identity. The problematic nature of the term ?race' thus means it is not valued as analytical category. …

The socialist core values leading the Campus Culture is an inevitable requirement of social and cultural construction, the practical needs of the construction of campus culture, socialist core values leading the construction of campus culture and talents inherent consistency of training objectives. Currently, the complex environment facing the construction of university campus culture and highlighting the issue itself, we urgently requires construction of campus culture to highlight the leading socialist core values of education, at the same time, the socialist core value education should be effective in the practice using the campus culture carrier and ultimately socialist core values education and culture complement of Campus.

To explore individual identity narratives of accommodation and resistance in relationship to dominant American social, political and cultural constructs, this paper uses the Listening Guide Method of Qualitative Inquiry (Gilligan et al., 2006) to investigate the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender and American identity during and post college among four second-generation, college educated, Korean American women. The analysis, drawing from the emergence of themes across interviews, found that participant women accommodated and/or resisted dominant American social, political, and cultural constructs in service of their individual Korean American identities narratives during and post college.