The Ideology Of Interpellation

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“all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject”. (Althusser 160)
The interpellation process, as introduced by Althusser, is a process where individuals recognize themselves through ideology. Althusser explains this by giving an example of the police hailing “Hey, you there!” The hailed individual would then turn around and by doing this, “he becomes a subject”. It should also be noted that the recognition is mutual: when the Subject recognizes him as a subject, the subject also needs to accept his subject-hood to the Subject. According to Althusser, subjects are constantly constituted by Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) such as the family, educational institutions and media.
The most relevant example that I usually think of is the functioning of gender. As argued by Teresa de Lauretis , Althusser’s statement (as quoted above) can still work if we simply change “ideology” into “gender”: gender functions the same way as ideologies do because it constitutes “concrete individuals as men and women”(19...

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