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Gender is not just a social construct

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Nonsense
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

Joined: 13 Jan 2018
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23 May 2018, 11:58 am

I believe people talking about social constructs mostly wildly misunderstand what it means when something is a social construct. Every concept we humans have made are social constructs. That doesn't mean that they are some kind of "made-up" or "fake" things but that we never can observe or understand them as if outside our social realities and how we understand further in endless cycles shape how the thing "is" because we can't separate it from our understanding. Chair is a social construct but you can still sit on it. In another world there could be some of what we now understand as "gendered" behaviours but which we would think with different framework than gender. In fact that's most of human history!



infinitenull
Veteran
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24 May 2018, 3:57 am

Nonsense wrote:
I believe people talking about social constructs mostly wildly misunderstand what it means when something is a social construct. Every concept we humans have made are social constructs. That doesn't mean that they are some kind of "made-up" or "fake" things but that we never can observe or understand them as if outside our social realities and how we understand further in endless cycles shape how the thing "is" because we can't separate it from our understanding. Chair is a social construct but you can still sit on it. In another world there could be some of what we now understand as "gendered" behaviours but which we would think with different framework than gender. In fact that's most of human history!


I am not sure that Chair is analogous with Gender though. Chairs are something that humans invented. You can actually see where no humans=no chairs. but no humans≠no gender... There still would be gendered creatures if humans didn't exist or observe them.


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vaguelyhumanoid
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

Joined: 1 Jun 2018
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10 Jun 2018, 4:18 pm

I would say that an individual experience of gender is 'objective' and has neurological components, but that the way gender categories are defined in society is 'socially constructed' and varies from culture to culture. So it's not socially constructed if (for instance) someone was assigned male at birth, presents as female-passing, but doesn't consider themself a woman, but there's a culturally defined element of how that person is categorized and perceived - that person might be called a transvestite or drag queen in 1960s New York, a hijra in contemporary India, and a nonbinary femme in a modern American queer space.