Relation to others· Society and historydifficulty
Social identity
Are categories like gender, race or class natural, constructed, or objective social realities?
Depending on whether these categories are facts of nature, mere ideas we could dispel by changing our words, or very real social forces, we fight inequality in quite different ways. To take a position is to say what, in the social order, can be undone, and what can only be acknowledged.
Social naturalism
0The major social categories track real, partly natural or biological differences: they are not pure inventions, and ignoring them does not make them disappear.
Explore this position →No figure stands here, in this slice.
Social construction
4These categories are not natural givens but contingent products of history, culture and power relations, instituted by norms and discourses that make them pass for natural. What has been constructed can be deconstructed: one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Explore this position →Beauvoirexplicit
If no biological, psychic or economic destiny settles in advance what a woman is, then femininity cannot be an essence: it is the outcome of an elaboration civilization imposes on the human female. Beauvoir here pries apart sex, a bodily given, and the becoming-woman shaped by upbringing, law and the gaze of others, grounding the distinction the theories of gender would take up. The consequence is political: what was built in history can be undone there, against any naturalism that would justify the hierarchy of the sexes by nature.
The Second Sex (1949), vol. II, opening
Existentialismexplicit
Applied to social identities, the thesis of existence without essence denies that they are natural givens: it is who draws the decisive formula, « one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman », making gender a historically constructed situation and not a nature. The Jew, for , likewise has no essence: it is the gaze of others that fixes them, and to take up that identity as an assumed project, rather than suffer or flee it, belongs to freedom, not to essence.
Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew; Beauvoir, The Second Sex
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Sartreexplicit
Existence precedes essence: no nature fixes in advance what one is. The Jew, Sartre shows, is in part made by the situation and the antisemite's gaze. Social identities are constructed, not given.
Anti-Semite and Jew; Existentialism Is a Humanism
Michel de Montaigneinferable
What we take for our identity, our tastes, our beliefs, our moral judgments, is very largely the deposit of the of the place and time we were born into: "we have no other test of truth than the example and pattern of the opinions and usages of our own country". Education and the fold of habit make us what we are, to the point where we mistake for a law of nature what is merely local usage. This lucidity about the social manufacture of our certainties places him on the side of construction, without his making it a systematic theory.
Essays, I, 23, "Of Custom" and II, 12
Social realism
2These categories are neither natural nor mere ideas that thought could dissolve: socially produced, they are nonetheless objectively real, embedded in institutions, material relations and hierarchies. Class is a relation to production, race a social position with very concrete effects.
Explore this position →Marxexplicit
Class is neither a natural given nor a mere idea: it is an objective position within the relations of production, defined by one's place in relation to the means of production. Real and structuring, it shapes consciousness more than it springs from it.
The Communist Manifesto; Capital
Marxismexplicit
What defines a class is neither rank, nor income, nor a sense of belonging, but the objective place one holds in the relations of production: whether or not one owns the means of production, whether one sells or buys labor power. Social identity is thus not a choice or a label one adopts, but a material condition that precedes the awareness one has of it, and that can remain hidden until a class has constituted itself "for itself." This rejects both the naturalization of hierarchies and the liberal picture of a society of interchangeable individuals.
Marx, Manifesto; Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
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Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveGender, race: nature or construction?
Are the great categories of identity, gender, race, anchored in a nature, or historical constructions we mistake for natures?
identity categoriesEssence and existence - DescriptiveIs the self made alone?
Does one become oneself through introspection alone, as a self-sufficient subject, or through the gaze and recognition of others, without whom the "I" would not take shape?
the self and othersNature of the self
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female assumes within society.Beauvoir · The Second Sex, vol. II