>Well, I'll give it a try. It's not very profound or complicated,
>and you may just consider it trivially true, but here's the idea.
>People's interactions produce "build" every aspect of our social
>world. Values, beliefs, attitudes, religious practices, political
>systems, nations are the product of ongoing social interactions.
>If you were to take away the relevant social interactions, that
>element of social reality would no longer have a practical role
>in a society (i.e., the U. S. would no longer exist as a
>nation-state if no one honored or recognized the U. S.
>government, laws, or citizenship; the Catholic church would
>not exist if no one practiced Catholic rituals or professed
>Catholic beliefs).
>
>Like I said, not too profound.
>
But you've provided a fairly clear description, which is _leagues_
better than what I've seen here and elsewhere. But as you've said, it
doesn't seem very profound when stated in simple and unambiguous terms.
It's not _wrong_, or without some content. But it's not exactly an
earth-shattering insight which requires years of study and
overspecialized jargon, either.
>Note, however, this idea
>has little or nothing to do with the "nature/nuture" debate.
>For instance, when I say "gender is socially constructed"
>I do not mean that men and women are biologically
>identical, or that biology has no effect on gender
>differences. Whether or not gender is based solely on
>biology, a person must socially enact gender and use
>gender in everyday life to label and make sense of others.
>(Test: do you need to see a biological marker of gender
>to identify a person as a man or a woman in everyday
>social settings?) So gender--as a part of shared
>social understanding--is socially produced and
>sustained.
>
It seems to me that speaking of biological issues as 'socially
constructed" not only introduces ambiguity, but it actually encourages it.
Let's take the example above, regarding "gender." In most clinical contexts, the terms "sex" and "gender" are more or less interchangeable. Sure, there are incidences of people with ambiguous genitalia, and someones one needs to check whether an X or Y chromosome is present. But when we're looking at human behavior, we're looking at an extremely complex lump of customs, values, expectations, and all the rest. And although it's a human habit to think of things as being male or female-- ineluctible aspects of a human being-- it's difficult to find a custom, value, or expectation that completely adheres to the biological distinctions.
For the sake of clarity, it'd help to say that our _notions_ of sex or gender in a social context rely on current social conditions, cultural values, and the like. But to say that _gender_ is "socially constructed" is, well, a rhetorical flourish at best. It's an attention-getter (sort of like saying Russia doesn't exist), but it encourages all kinds of misinterpretation.
Let me give you an example. I recall a news item about five years ago, where a kid went to his neighbors with a petition to restrict the use of a chemical called "dihydrogen monoxide." His petition said it was dangerous stuff-- immersion in it can kill you within ten minutes, it can burn you in its gaseous state, etc. Not surprisingly, he got a number of names on his petition. It's an old gag, of course, since "dihydrogen monoxide" is just a clever name for water. The story gets told among the "junk science" corporate flacks as proof of how easily people get scared over chemicals.
But that's not what the story actually says. If the kid had used plain language, nobody'd have signed their name to the petition. Instead, he used jargon, and rhetorical techniques to grab peoples' attention, and _mislead_ them-- and then faulted people for being misled. I think something similar happens when people make claims like "gender is socially constructed" or "the Gulf War never happened." The phrasing _demands_ misinterpretation-- and to fault people for taking the words at face value isn't much different than saying, "Look, I was just trying to get your attention. How could you be so _stupid_ as to take me seriously?"
I remember a conversation I had with a friend who was getting worked up over an account he'd read, of the British settlers giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. The account called the tactic "germ warfare," and my friend was denouncing this as modern-day political correctness. Why? Because the germ theory of disease hadn't been developed in the mid-1700's, so it was _inaccurate_ to hold General Amherst to such modern notions. I pointed out that the term was perfectly legitimate to use-- for example, humans threw rocks at each other long before the science of ballistics was developed. (It's sort of like saying that, because slavery in ancient Greece was different from slavery in the antebellum South, slavery didn't exist in Greece.)