Social Construction of Difference and Oppression

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, definitions, and scholars related to the social construction of difference, categorization, anthropometry, reification, and the phases of oppression.

Social Construction

An epistemological framework that provides a foundational system of beliefs to understand how historically, culturally, and interactionally contingent phenomena create human identities, group differences, and assigned roles.

5 elements of social construction

• -dominant culture is standard

• -labeling + reifying (creating something and treating is an objective) to include and exclude ppl

• -stereotyping

• -terms and categories to emphasize dominant vs subordinate (3rd vs 1st world, global s or n)

• -romantizing as a form of appropriation

Social Categorization

The tool of labeling humans based on physical, biological, and genetic differences, used to define inclusion versus exclusion and to prescribe social roles, status, power, and privilege.

Anthropometry

The scientific measurement of the human body that drove 19th-century scientific work on race and sexuality under the assumption that the body serves as a legible text for symbolic codes.

african women are curvy = inviting sex

Biological Determinism

The framework asserting that the surface and interior of the individual body, rather than its social characteristics such as language or clothing, are the primary sites of its meaning.

Social Categorization Borders

As defined by Rodriguez, the daily reproduction of ideas and myths leading to an 'us v. other' distinction despite having no real, true, or valid line separating different worlds.

Reification

The process of transforming human beings, abstract ideas, or concepts into mere 'things' from which dominant groups seek to profit, valuing humans in quantified and commodified forms.

Okot p'Bitek

The author who stated that reification leads to a 'systematic and intensive use of dirty gossip' in place of solid and sensitive scholarship.

Oppression

The exercise of tyranny by a ruling group, or structural disadvantage embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, symbols, and institutional rules of society.

Can be from a well-intentioned society.

Exploitation

A face of oppression that occurs through a steady process of transferring the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another.

Marginalization

A face of oppression characterized as a deliberate strategy to confine certain people in a situation that the system of labor cannot or will not use.

Contingent Marginality

A condition resulting from competitive inequality in which individuals and communities are placed at a disadvantage due to economic dynamics and market limitations.

Systematic Marginality

Disadvantages experienced by communities within a socially constructed system of inequitable relations under a hegemonic order allowing one group to exercise undue power and control.

Powerlessness

A state of oppression in which individuals and groups are deprived of authority, being forced to take orders while rarely having the right to give them.

Cultural Imperialism

A face of oppression defined as the universalization of a dominant group's experience and culture, establishing it as the societal norm.