Relation to others· Society and history
Social construction
Axis: Social identity — Are categories like gender, race or class natural, constructed, or objective social realities?
These 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.
Movements 1
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
Philosophers 3
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
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
Show inferred positions (1)
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