Social Construction

1157 Words3 Pages

The majority of people seem to think sexuality as a given, something natural and coming from God and biology has a lot to do with it. Now, as a society that's constantly changing, observing and questioning many things of society and cultures; there comes a realization that many concepts in life are constructed instead of it plainly being existential just because of God or biology itself created it. When people think of the word "construction" they usually think of huge machinery, materials and things being built with these huge types of machinery and materials, it's similar as concepts being constructed. Concepts are being constructed by these huge machinery and materials, all tools that work together to create one thing. The materials and …show more content…

I never thought outside of that box, that there was more to the concept or believed that the concept within itself was constructed. To be able to make clearer on how we can use these concepts to make more sense of the life we live in, more clear the society we live in, the concept itself has to be explained. The term social construct derives from the understanding that a certain concept or idea is being constructed by society. To define the term it could be said that "A social construct refers to a phenomenon or category and developed by society through its cultural and social practices" (Christiansen and Fischer, 5), which in other words means that that society plays a huge role in constructing a concept. To understand the concept social construction of sexuality it has to be seen how different types of views on socially constructed things. In Chapter 2, Theoretical Perspectives, author Steve Seidman mentions sociologist Jeffrey Weeks and his approach on sexuality and introduced the ideas of essentialism and constructionism. Weeks states that by definition, the essentialism perspective is a view that some …show more content…

In Springer, she defines the word Queer to better explain queering heterosexuality, "Queerness, them, is not an identity but a position or stance. We can use "queer" as a verb instead of a noun. Queer is not someone or something to be treated. Queer is something that we can do" (Springer, 86). To put the words queer and heterosexual together, in other words, means that while being heterosexual one can be queer, to do something out of the norm. To not be queer is to conform to others thoughts on people should be or do traditionally, such as serving others for their own satisfaction and pleasure and being property. Springer emphasized this idea when she states "Claiming queerness is linguistic, but ultimately about actions that does not reinforce the stereotypes". Which means queerness is about action of going against stereotypes, and queering heterosexuality is being able to be heterosexual but do things differently and express their genders in nontraditional

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