Jake Strange
ENGL 254
February 19, 2015
Blog 5
For the purpose of this blog post, I will be relating Hanfler's explanation of "social construction" to Vershawn Ashanti Young's "Should Writers Use They Own English?" and Judith Lorber's "Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender." To give this nebulous term a concise meaning, "social construction" is -- to me -- a set of both overtly and subversively communicated behaviors and identifiers that are defined as either normal or deviant by a larger society. Under this theory, ideas such as class, gender and race are machinations that are "constructed by society."
Vershawn Ashanti Young relates the concept of social construction to language and writing in her unique essay "Should Writers Use They Own English?" Most of what she writes is a rather scathing criticism of the philosophies of literary theorist Stanley Fish, who holds that in order to get ahead in life and succeed as a writer, one must suppress their individual voice and adhere to the style of what he calls "standard English." Fish contends that certain voices and dialects make people "subject to prejudices," to which Young responds, "It’s ATTITUDES. It be the way folks with some power perceive other people’s language. Like the way some view, say, black English when used in school or at work. Black English dont make it own-self oppressed. It be negative views about other people usin they own language..."
In my experience as a student, an unfortunate truth is that this notion of "standard English" is a fairly common expectation in the classroom. To be fair, I have had some teachers and professors who urged encouraged students to write more for style and novelty, rather than following a predetermined format. But more commonly I have been required to adapt an almost "checklist mentality" with my writing in order to earn recognition or a high grade on an assignment.
On the other hand, Judith Lorber effectively relates this idea of social construction to sex, gender and the societal roles of men and women in "Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender." I found it incredibly interesting that on page 59, transgender subject Jan Morris adopted the socially constructed idea of "learned helplessness" that is associated with women.
"And if other's responses shifted, so did my own. The more I was treated as woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself."
I particularly enjoyed the chapter from this larger piece, as the "gender gap" between men and women that Lorber discusses is something I make a concerted effort to discredit. I am dating an -- as she puts it oh-so-eloquently -- "loud and proud feminist," who has introduced gender-equal initiatives on our own campus. I think what she is doing is great!
It is my belief that an individual's worth, be they man or woman, should be determined by their abilities, character and merit. For example, if a man is more capable than a woman in a shared workplace, the man deserves the opportunity to advance more than the woman. The opposite absolutely holds true as well; if the woman is better than the man, she should be recognized and rewarded for it. Sadly, the world we live in isn't so cut-and-dry. To be, for lack of a better word, "lumped" into an underrepresented category from birth as a woman is an injustice. While society is far from where it ultimately needs to be, it is rewarding to see equal opportunities being encouraged and -- to a degree -- afforded for both sexes.
