Introduction
Kiheung Kim in The Social Construction of Disease, 2006
In the light of the preceding exposition, I can now provide a brief answer to the question, ‘What is social construction?’ Social construction refers to the whole process of collectively taking account of our experience. Without a verbalised account of our daily experiences, there is no such thing as a shared understanding of what we loosely call ‘nature’. Society mediates our response to nature. In this context, the ‘social’ in social construction is not an alternative to nature or reality; rather, as Bloor asserts, it is the vehicle and channel for the response to nature (2004: 929). Bloor claims that ‘without society all we should have in the realm of cognition would be an atomized collection of individual efforts and opinions – something vastly weaker and qualitatively different from the social phenomenon we call “science” ’ (2004: 929).
Introduction
Gerry R. Cox, Neil Thompson in Death and Dying, 2020
It is for this reason that sociology relies heavily on the concept of “social construction.” Thompson (2018a) explains it in the following terms: Social construction has two main meanings that are separate, but related. First, it refers to how certain things are created by society – they are, to use Durkheim’s phrase, social facts. Social institutions are an example of this. For instance, the law is socially constructed, in the sense that, if there were no society, there would be no law (and no need for law)…. Social construction can also be used in a separate but related sense to refer to the process whereby certain social facts are defined by society (or, more specifically, through social processes …). For example, there is a common tendency to see childhood as a distinct phase in human development and therefore to see children as distinct from adults. However, on closer inspection, we can see that childhood is socially constructed – that is, the idea that children are distinct from adults is something that has been defined societally.(p. 40) This key idea of social construction is one that we will come back to at various points in the chapters that follow, as it is a central feature of what sociology has to offer in terms of taking forward our understanding of death and dying.
New intellectual energies The emergence and basis of non-representational theory
Gavin J. Andrews in Non-Representational Theory & Health, 2018
The fourth critique is centred on life as ever constructing. This argues that social constructionism deals in fundamental understandings on constructed categories – such as race, health, sex, nation and place – but that these constitute general and premature conclusions that researchers adhere to (Taussig, 1993; Anderson and Harrison, 2010). The theoretical point here is that even if we were to believe that life can reach a constructed state, this necessarily has to come after earlier states of existence that were less constructed and constructing; that were far more fluid, messy, raw and acted (Taussig, 1993; Anderson and Harrison, 2010). These need to be in some way addressed in research, rather than leading empirical inquiry straight into the collection of data on a constructed subject (moreover into human opinions that are always subjective, relational, and often result from personal emotional (over)amplification). In sum, in contrast to social constructionism, NRT does not perceive there to be a constructed world requiring representation. The idea is instead that, in its purest form, the lived world is an ongoing performance; a physical never ending (re)construction (Thrift, 2004a).
Radical “Boyhood” Futures for the Twenty-First Century, or, Pinocchio (Finally) Gets His Phallus
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2019
Like Salamon (2010), I am sympathetic to the political aims of such projects, which lend credibility and authenticity to the experience of gender that some trans* folks have with and through their bodies (p. 41). However, such a place of “plenitude” outside meaning, language, the symbolic, and so on ultimately can only be one of abjection, psychoanalytically speaking (p. 41). Social construction is not equal to queer theory or “performativity,” though it is thoroughly related to both, not fictional or less important than our theorizing about sexed and gendered bodies. Rather, social construction is defined as how our bodies are “always shaped by the social world in which we are inescapably situated” (p. 76). It isn’t possible or desirable to extract the body from social relations or cultural images either. However, importantly, neither can we say that the social world is the only determining factor of gender and sexual identity. Following the work of intersex theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) and many others, I argue instead for the view that the material body and psychic processes both play a role in the formation of gender, and yet they intertwine and form a complex weave that is impossible to clearly separate. I address here the ways that images, cultural production, and community support help trans* subjects to conceive of boyhood possibilities that integrate the body and the psyche, and go beyond “phallic narcissism-qua-masculinity,” which is so often the sole determining factor of one’s manhood or boyhood.
A Critique of Queer Phenomenology: Gender and the Sexual
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2019
Gender as a social construction is inscribed socially. But for Laplanche, this assignment does not occur by society in general but by the socii: “It is really the father, the mother, a friend, a brother, a cousin, etc. It is thus the small group of socii that inscribes in the social, but it is not Society that does the assigning” (Laplanche, 2007, p. 214, italics in original). Gender is assigned by messages that spring from the language and bodies of adult others and from the social code or social language. This social code is “the message of the socius” (Laplanche, 2007, p. 215), and such messages are messages of gender assignment: The theory of general seduction sets out from the idea of messages from the other. In these messages there is a code or carrier wave, that is to say, a basic language that is preconscious-conscious language … there are preconscious–conscious messages, and that the parental unconscious is like the “noise”—in the sense of communication theory—that comes to disturb and compromise the preconscious-conscious messages. (Laplanche, 2007, p. 215, italics in original)
Death Determination and Clinicians’ Epistemic Authority
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2020
David Rodríguez-Arias, Alberto Molina-Pérez, Gonzalo Díaz-Cobacho
The third phase in the process of death determination is the interpretation of the biological condition of the organism in ontological terms. Ontology refers to a more fundamental question: what sort of property or phenomenon is death? Is it a biological fact that we just observe, or rather a social construction that we decide upon agreement? Death touches deeply held personal and religious beliefs, and its social, moral, and spiritual implications are constitutive of a society’s sense of itself. However, our modern medical conception of death relies on the assessment of physiological facts alone—in particular the cessation of specific functions of the body—leaving aside all other non-biological considerations. While physicians have an undisputed expertise in their judgments on facts about human physiology—the presence or absence of brain functions–, they may feel less authoritative in their interpretations of these facts in terms of life and death, especially as these concepts’ meaning and implications exceed by far the limits of their medical training and competence.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Social Environment
- Social Norm
- Belief
- Value
- Self-Concept
- Stereotype
- Personal Construct Theory
- Meaning-Making
- Narrative Therapy
- Solution-Focused Brief Therapy