The Social Construction of Gender: The Turn to Fiction

Abstract

Both within sociology and within women’s studies, there has been interest, of late, in the social construction of gender, that is, in the ways in which the individual comes to learn of his or her sex and the ways in which the society comes to regard that sexuality. The sociologist, then, always wants to know the historicity of the there-ness, and, sociological inquiries into facts of class, status and power—the indices of social stratification-are ways of understanding the construction of social selves. Social constructionism becomes social determinism through the myth of biological determinism. The turn to fiction, the reading of M. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, allows the social theorist to look at the same kinds of questions from a different perspective, one in which the artist is not bound by the same kind of paradigmatic constraints as is the social theorist.