Human beings are not passive observers of the world around us, but are active participants in it. Our perception of the world is not merely the objective recording and labeling of things “out there”, but instead the product of a complex and often invisible interaction between our needs at the moment, our culture, our personal history, our creativity, our class background, our educational achievements, our desires and our fears. What we see (or hear, or understand, or experience in any way) is not the “raw” stuff of reality but reality as processed by our minds. The categories that we put things into – gender, race, class, and so on – do not exist “out there” in the world, but are instead ways of organizing the vast number of stimuli our brains receive into some sense of order, some state that will allow us to act on and in the world.

The process of organizing, categorizing, and comprehending the world we live in is known to social scientists and philosophers as “social construction”. Social constructions emerge from our collective attempts to understand reality, and exist in society by virtue of conventions – the collective “agreement” that a particular social construction is not only the best but the right way to represent the world.

Games are a clear example of social constructions. Consider chess: without conventions – the rules we all agree to play by – chess simply does not exist. It is a piece of wood and a bunch of carved pieces. It is our agreement that the figure that resembles a horse should occupy a specific starting position on the board and should be allowed to move two spaces in any direction and then one space perpendicular to the initial direction, jumping over other pieces in its way, that constitutes the carving as “a knight” and gives it meaning. Likewise with all the other pieces: we agree that this piece shall be called “a pawn” and move one way and that piece “a bishop” and shall move a different way. The rules impose limits, but they also impose possibilities; without the rules, the pieces can move any way you want – up, down, thrown across a room, dropped out of a window, hidden behind a book – but their movement has no meaning, because there is no game to “mean” in.

Social scientists describe the conventions that make social living possible in the same way. We break the world up into manageable “chunks” by categorizing the objects and people in it. For instance, we commonly think of objects as animal, vegetable, or mineral. This is a meaningful distinction for most of us, although for scientists, it is not useful enough. For the working biologist, there are plants and animals (technically Animalia and Plantae), but also Monera (prokaryotic bacterium), Protista (slime molds and such), and Fungi. Many scientists now make use of two Superkingdoms, Prokaryota and Eukaryota. The distinctions that matter to biologists, though, rarely matter to us in our everyday lives – and may not matter to members of cultures different than ours, or people with different goals than our own. Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine author, imagined a classification scheme that he ascribed to an (invented) Chinese encyclopedia, in which animals were categorized as follows:

1. belonging to the Emperor
2. embalmed
3. tame
4. sucking pigs
5. sirens
6. fabulous
7. stray dogs
8. included in the present classification
9. frenzied
10. innumerable
11. drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
12. et cetera
13. having just broken the water picture
14. that from a long way off look like flies

We can recognize each of these categories as valid in and of itself (well, most of them…) “tame animals” or “embalmed animals” seem like reasonable enough distinctions. But Borges’ classification seems absurd to us because it simply does not offer us enough meaningful information about the differences, and similarities, between them. Of course “sucking pigs” are different from “stray dogs”, but so what? Still, there’s no objective reason to reject Borges’ categories out of hand – someone else might look at our own classification of animals, plants, and minerals and also ask, “So what?”

Social constructions are not just categories imposed on the world, however; as the name suggests, they “construct” – they make – the world. Consider sex, for instance. No, not that kind of sex – the biological sex of a newborn child. We are accustomed to thinking about the sex of an infant as a given fact: it’s either a boy or a girl. Yet according to research by Anne Fausto-Sterling, 1 out of every 100 live births are intersexed in some way – they have ambigious genitalia, external genitalia different from those predicted by the presence of an “X” or “Y” chromosone, or extra “X” or “Y” chromosomes. Simply put, about 1% of us are born neither clearly “male” nor clearly “female”. And yet far fewer than 1% of the people you meet are neither male nor female; by and large, we rarely meet anyone who we do not consider – and, more importantly, who does not consider him- or herself – clearly male or female. Ambiguously sexed infants are generally assigned to either one or the other sex, often with the use of reconstructive surgery (although, given the lack of a “proper” sex to “go back to”, the “re-” is a little misplaced; we may as well call it “constructive surgery”), using criteria that by any standard are arbitrary and even crude. “It’s easier to poke a hole than to build a pole.”

If something as seemingly apparent as biological sex can be arbitrary and based on criteria that have little or nothing to do with a person’s actual biology, how much moreso must “gender”, the behaviors and personality characteristics associated with sex, be? Although in our species there is some small amount of average physical difference between men and women, there is not nearly enough variation to account for either the different expectations of men and women within any given society, nor for the variation between expectations of either gender in different societies. Anthropologists often find that what is considered an ideal woman in one society may well consist of characteristics associated with women in another, and vice versa. Even when it comes to physical strength, many women in our society best many men – and yet we divide participants in sports and other activities where physical strength is important not by physical ability but by gender.

Race is another biological “fact” that is socially constructed – the way we categorize people has little to do with underlying biological difference, and much to do with the history and structure of a given society. Humans are among the least diverse of mammal species, and yet scientists not so long ago argued over whether there were 35 or 50 races of humans. Today, we generally accept a division of the world’s people into 4 races: black, white, Asian, and Native American. Some lump Asians and Native Americans together; others all non-Africans (and some Africans). These distinctions may have some validity when tracing ancestries (although most of us are so mixed that the utility of even simple distinctions becomes questionable) but have little utility for just about anything else. And yet we behave as if these distinctions were not only very real but very meaningful – and they are.

Class is not usually considered a biological reality (although there are some who feel that a high position in society represents a very real, innate superiority), but rather an economic one. But class correlates only superficially to wealth. Someone who rises from poverty to amass great riches may find it exceedingly hard to fit in upper-crust society; likewise, someone who loses their fortune and is forced into abject poverty may find a distinct lack of acceptance from their fellow poor. Things like the way you dress, the art you enjoy, the kind of cars that appeal to you, the music you listen to, the food you eat, and the way you talk and carry yourself say much, much more about your class than how much money is in your wallet.

Now, a common mistake is to assume that when something is described as “socially constructed” that the speaker is saying it doesn’t exist, that it’s not really real. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Our social interactions, our economic status, our lives, even our very selves are profoundly shaped by the way sex, race, class, and gender are constructed in our societies. The conventions surrounding these categories not only limit our actions (“that’s not ladylike!”; “you have no class”) but make them possible. We act in the world as men (or women), whites (or blacks, or Asians, or…), working class (or middle or upper class) agents, constructing our actions and our selves from the “material” our society provides. And, in fact, for all their power in society, none of these categories is beyond challenge – norms change (people change them), but even more importantly, people act “outside the lines” all the time. Transvestites, actors, light-skinned blacks or dark-skinned whites, gays and lesbians, inter-racial partners, and many, many others – including, in the end, most of us at one time or another – may act out roles different from those prescribed by society, although often the cost is high. But even when we act in ways that “break the rules”, the rules give our transgressions meaning.

If we accept that we live in a world that is socially constructed, then our constructions are more real than reality – in fact, they are our reality. They are the world imbued with meaning by us, the world in which we dwell. This can be hard for us to accept, as we’re accustomed to thinking of the real and the imagined as two very different categories. Alas, those categories are, of course, socially constructed.

Work Cited

Jorge Luis Borges.

1969. The Book of Imaginary Beings. New York: Avon Books.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.

Categorization is important — the ability to generalize from past experience in order to make decisions about the present or future, for instance, is central to all learning, planning, and acting in the world. From our first conscious experiences, we are learning to categorize the world — self and other, kin and non-kin, safe and unsafe. Some categories arise out of our individual experience, others are imposed on us by our language, our social structures, our cultural beliefs — verb and noun, bedroom and living room, soup spoon and teaspoon, sin and mitzvah. Because categories are so important, and because culture works to make its operation transparent, its easy to forget that categories are something the human mind imposes on the world, and that often the categories that seem most natural, most “real”, are not natural at all, and may even work against us.

If we are concerned with changing the way people interact with the world and with each other — or even if we are only interested in understanding people’s actions — it is worthwhile to challenge the categories that seem most central to our sense of our selves, the ones that seem most obvious. These are the categories that we use as “shorthand” for who we are, the ones that we habitually and non-reflexively assign ourselves to repeatedly in the course of our day-to-day lives.

• male/female: Anne Fausto Sterling’s research has shown that as many as one of every hundred people are born in an intersexed condition of some sort, either ambiguously sexed or bearing external genitalia that do not match internal organs or chromosonal sex. In addition, a large number of both men and women choose to medically or cosmetically assume appearances at odds with their chromosonal sex. Categorizing people as either “male” or “female” is more and more difficult, relying as it does on the culturally-informed interpretation of a set of markers — ranging from the use of make-up to the possession of a penis — that differ from culture to culture and from person to person. Since few of us have access to the kind of equipment to determine chromosonal sex — and since chromosonal sex is such a poor indicator of behavior, social role, appearance, and so on — we are forced to “work backwards” from appearance, role, behavior, etc. in a manner that is fraught with power and danger, only to be forever uncertain of our conclusions.
• gay/straight: I live in a society (the United States) that has long been obsessed with maintaining “proper” sexual orientations, an obsession matched in intensity by the uncertainty about what, exactly, those orientations entail. Many, many men routinely have sexual relations with other men while denying that they are gay or even bisexual. Behavior does not correlate with internal mental states or with identity. Consider the Catholic Church’s recent denial of ordination to gay men — even if they are celibate and have been for up to 3 years. Given the non-determinativeness of sexual behavior (despite the fact that it’s what “orientation” is supposed to predict) especially among the willingly celibate, the Church looks to “participation in gay culture” — which, of course, you don’t have to be gay to do. Many non-gay people participate in sexual behaviors associated with homosexuality, whether its anal sex, mutual masturbation, oral sex, even intercourse with a member of the same sex. Bisexuals and transgendered people give even out gays and lesbians category crises — can a woman who has slept only with men be bisexual? If a gay man has sex with a women, is he bisexual?

  In lieu of behavior, categorization as gay or straight relies on self-identification — but of course, we are not always the best suited to identify ourselves, either. Those of the category “asshole” rarely recognize themselves as such. Gay men and women may, for a variety of reasons, avoid identifying themselves — even to themselves. Or they may decide to “give up” their homosexual behaviors, again for a variety of reasons — does this make them straight? Likewise, straight people, especially men (in our society), seem pressured to continually re-affirm their straightness — but, of course, this too is no indicator of whether or not a man is “truly” straight. Judith Butler was onto something when she described gender and sexual orientation as performative, but even that is giving too much credit to the categories — sexual orientation is a matter of desire in the moment, a state of mind that may or may not be transitory. Identities may be built on these states of mind — or they may not be.

• child/adult: Adulthood is defined by access to a set of specific rights and the taking on of a set of specific obligations — rights and obligations which change from culture to culture. The withholding of these rights and obligations from children is justified by an appeal to the incomplete mental, emotional, and (in some societies, such as ours) sexual development of the young. As with gender and sexual orientation, however, childhood describes a mental state that can only be guessed at by the rest of society. Just as it is possible to be a strong, aggressive woman or an asexual gay man, it is possible for some children to be more self-aware and better able to make crucial decisions than many adults — except that they are barred from doing so. While a gay woman may exhibit the outward behavior of a straight woman (or of a straight man, for that matter), an unusually mature child may not demonstrate the behaviors of an adult — not legally.

  In our society, many of the limitations imposed around the categories of child and adult are sexual: a child lacks the ability to meaningfully consent to sexual relations. This is based on an increasingly tenuous belief that minors do not have sex, and therefore cannot fully grasp the implications of their actions. And yet the arbitrariness of the border between the ability to consent and the inability to consent is apparent in the flexibility with which the age of consent is established — a 14 year old might well be gifted with the ability to meaningfully consent while find him- or herself lacking that ability in another. Further, a 17 year old may find her- or himself able to meaningfully consent to relations with a person their own age but not someone a year older. The meaninglessness of these distinctions is apparent — but the breach of these categories is considered far more threatening than the breach of gender or orientation.

• black/white: Technically, all racial distinctions need questioning, but in the US blackness has been the crucial marker of “race”, and racial distinctions have generally fallen into a continuum from white to black. Race is an unusually strong category, given the almost complete lack of scientific data in support of racial distinctions — people simply cannot get their heads around the idea that such clearly visible differences could make so correlate with so little substantive difference. Unlike the categories mentioned above, race is not merely a matter of subjective experience of self — it is as much ascribed by society as it is experienced as identity. Although them, too, race is understood to be additive — one can be both black and white — even as the need for categorization forces such “additives” back into one or the other.

  Actually, just one — “black and white” in the US still largely equals “black”. Bob Marley, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Ellison all had white parents — and are all considered, without a moment’s hesitation, “black”. Walter Mosley, another child of white and black parents, told the Las Vegas Mercury last year, “I’m a black man in America. There’s no question about that, and I don’t have any choice about it.” Perhaps the permeability of the white-black border — like that between child and adult — offers a clue to why it continues to be guarded so closely, even to the point of demanding a one-or-the-other answer to the question of “white or black” even as we recognize the possibility of the “white and black”.

The categories above all rest on an assumption of biological imperative; they are, in a word, “natural”. My second post (hopefully tomorrow, but who knows?) will address a couple of other categories worth questioning that aren’t embedded in biology — including the category of “natural” itself — and close with some further thoughts on categorization. Till then…