Describe and analyse an aspect of your life which has been affected by COVID-19, using what you have learned in this unit.
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SOCI1010Week11LectureSlides.pdf
PART 1: IDENTITY
BE YOURSELF. EXPRESS YOURSELF. • What is the self? • What do we know at this stage in the course?
• Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” The self comes from within, the self can be known. • Cooley: the looking glass self. We develop our ‘self’ through how we think others see us. • Foucault: the self emerges as an effect of discourse, it does not pre-exist discourse.
• The ‘self’ is socially produced.
IDENTITY/THE SELF AND CONSUMERISM • We’re all unique, and want to express this to others. • How do we do this? Through consumerism (or, by resisting it, actively) • We buy particular brands and particular products.
IDENTITY • Identity and the ‘self’ is taken as a given. • We want a coherent, stable, unified sense of self, and craft our lives
accordingly. • “Be yourself.” “This is not who I am.” “This feels like me.” • Constantly working towards maintaining this sense that we have a
unified identity. We don’t want inconsistency. • Identity itself has come to be viewed as something ahistorical and
acultural. It has become a tool through which we unquestioningly understanding ourselves, others, and the world.
PARADOX We aim to find individuality and to express our unique tastes and identities. But how can we do this in a consumer culture where many of the things we buy are mass-produced and mass-marketed, and brands play a role?
THIS BRINGS US BACK TO… THE NORM • Our style and shopping habits tell us something about who we are but, at
the same time, many of the things we buy and love are the same as what other people buy and love. That’s precisely why we want them. • Our wants, the things we feel express something about ourselves, don’t
come from within us: linked to what the norm is at a given point in time. What’s ‘in’ right now? • We use brands to align ourselves with a larger group, • and to convey who we are to others: this is who I am and I want to be
recognised by others as such. • So this is always in relation to others. That which we think comes from
within us is very much shaped by social forces.
GOFFMAN: STIGMA • Identity management. Identity isn’t inborn but is developed through
social processes, it is a process that is ongoing. • Stigma: “a deeply discrediting attribute” (1963, p. 3) that is looked
down upon in a given society. E.g. disability, sexual orientation. These are produced as stigma in social processes, and place individuals in less valued identity categories (see also last week): we get stereotyping, discrimination, and a loss of status. • You can: hide the stigma, distance yourself from the stigma, embrace
the stigma. • What is signified as stigma is not natural but is contingent, and
changes over time.
GIDDENS: REFLEXIVE PROJECT OF THE SELF • Pre-modern societies: identity was more fixed. The key aspects of people’s identities
were laid out for people from when they were kids, by tradition. • Today: in many places, many people have more choices. This means that our identities
are more open-ended and ambiguous. But this creates challenges. • Giddens (1991): because there is no clearly prescribed path laid out for us, we actively
have to work on our identities. • “What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in
circumstances of late modernity – and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behavior.” (Giddens 1991: 70)
• For Giddens, the “reflexive project of the self” is a key characteristic of modern life: this is about how we reflect on who we want to be and how we can construct our ‘self’ in the everyday.
• Consumer culture plays a role, today, in how we engage in such reflexive project of the self.
GIDDENS: LIFESTYLE • “the question, ‘How shall I live?’ has to be answered in day-to-day
decisions about how to behave, what to wear and what to eat— and many other things” (1991: 14). • Lifestyle: an amalgamation/constellation of choices that result in and
allow for the expression of a coherent self. E.g. a ”green” lifestyle • “people use consumption to cobble together a coherent identity
within the context of fragmented society” (Ahuvia 2005: 172).
CRAFTING IDENTITY • Is this liberation? Or are the choices and decisions we can make limited by
gender, race, class, ability, age, etc.? • Abundance of choice can be overwhelming. • How do we craft a meaningful sense of self in a capitalist environment that
is profit-driven and consumerist, and that continuously presents us with more and newer options? • We want to solifidy our identity, but can never fully achieve this. This drives
consumption. • This is because the identity as something that we can ‘find’ once and for all
in ourselves or that we can ‘achieve’ once and for all is a fiction. It is real but is nonetheless a fiction. The very notion of identity is a tool implicated in structuring our behaviours.
PART 2: BEAUTY
BEAUTY IS SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED • We experience beauty at an individual level and this can feel deeply
personal. • However, these feelings are unpinned by social processes. • How we make sense of the world is socially created, rather than
occurring because of some pre-determined biological truth. • We use socially constructed categories, and they organise our
experiences and understandings of our surroundings. • E.g. we use labels such as ‘beautiful’, ‘handsome’, ‘hot’, and ‘sexy’. We
experience these words as individual thoughts but their meaning links to a range of social processes, linked to structures of power.
BEAUTY IS SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED Ideals of appearance are not simply natural, they emerge in a particular historical and cultural context, and they ‘do’ things.
INTERSECTIONALITY • Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989
‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,’ University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989. ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,’ Stanford Law Review, 1991.
• “the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism and . . . these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or antiracism. Because of their intersectional identity as both women and of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, women of color are marginalized within both.” (1244)
INTERSECTIONALITY
OR INTERSECTIONALITY?
INTERSECTIONALITY So what is this about? • This is not about identity itself, but about systems of power (racism, sexism, heterosexism, capitalism, etc). • Systems of power intersect, there is never a ‘single axis’. • Systems of power work so as to marginalise some, and to privilege others. • This is not measuring privilege or oppression. Some people are not ‘doubly’ or ‘triply’ oppressed. It’s not a
mathematical calculation. Sitting at the intersection of different axes creates different experiences.
So what? • We can’t talk about identity without also talking about systems of power that produce these identities. • If we want to realise human rights, we must think intersectionally. • Identity becomes a tool for deconstructing power, theoretically and in practice. • We can use intersectionality and identity to ask who is marginalised and who is privileged, and we must do
this continuously. This allows us to recognise how power and oppression work, and it is a continuous project.
BEAUTY • A sociological analysis of ideals of physical appearance can tell us
which traits are socially valued, and how they come to be valued. • Beauty ideals are socially constructed, and linked to operations of
power: intersectionality. • Capitalism and consumerism: ‘culture of lack’ and body
dissatisfaction.
GOOGLE: ‘BEAUTY’
GOOGLE: ‘BEAUTY+MEN’
GOOGLE: ‘BEAUTY+WOMEN’
‘BEAUTY COMES FROM WITHIN’ • We like to tell people that beauty comes from within, yet we
seem to have to apply it from the outside. • ‘Body work’: the labor that people perform (or hire others to
perform) in order to manage and manipulate their bodies to fulfill a variety of cultural expectations/
• What we find beautiful has less to do with personal attraction, and more with cultural forces.
• At every instance, popular culture tells us that only a very narrow range of bodies are attractive: • Young • Skinny • White • Able-bodied • Gender-conforming
• Awareness of these cultural forces and how they impact our own experiences and how we interpret others around us can help us to effect change.
BEAUTY IS A POLITICAL TOOL
BEAUTY IS A POLITICAL TOOL
PROTEST • Social media: #bodypositivity, #acnepositivity and #freethepimple • Debates on social media about the ‘whiteness’ of the conversation. • The #bodypositivity movement: Why is there a binary between negative
and positive feelings? Why do we have to have positive feelings about our bodies – if you don’t feel positive about your body, you have failed. It places the onus on the individual to be positive about their body while denying the social structures that make it very difficult to do so. • The #acnepositivity and #freethepimple movement: A movement of largely
young women. ‘You can be beautiful even with acne.” This reproduces the notion that women have to be beautiful, it does little to question the normative link between women/femininity and beauty.
CONSUMERISM AND A CULTURE OF BODILY LACK • Featherstone (1991): culture of bodily lack. • Dworkin and Wachs (2009: 36): “a culture of ‘bodily lack’ that requires constant maintenance” • This culture functions so as to highlight to us that we constantly fall short when it comes to our appearance.
It encourages us to want more, makes us believe we need more, and as such, makes us buy more to achieve beauty ideals.
• It’s not about what a body can do, but about what we’re missing. That which we’re missing is, however, not so much something we’re actually missing. It has been created for us as such, in a capitalist society that wants us to buy more. We are encouraged to constantly look for the things that can help us to achieve beauty ideals.
• But because the beauty ideals themselves are socially constructed, we can never achieve them. The ideals change, and so what we need/want changes, which means we keep buying things and keep feeling bad about ourselves.
• This ranges from make-up trends to botox treatments and labiaplasty. • Corporations benefit from this. Some branches of medicine benefit from this (e.g. psychology/psychiatry,
cosmetic surgery.) • Intersectionality is important here: which bodies are rejected? Which bodies are normative? Which bodies
do we try to incorporate into the norm?
BEAUTY COMPANIES, DIVERSITY, AND CAPITALISM
L’Oréal uses first trans model
Dove Real Beauty Campaign
Make-up brands start catering for dark skin
