our identities

our identities

The social identities sociologists are concerned with are those that carry significant weight societally (race, citizenship, gender, sexuality, class, age, disability, religion, body size, etc.). These identities are socially constructed categories invented by culture (economics, urbanization, war, science, politics, etc.). Many were created in order to divide or create superiority. These identities shape our lives. Having multiple social identities is called intersectionality. Observations about identity contribute to social identity theory, including inclination to form social groups, incorporate these groups into our identity, enforce group boundaries, and maximizing personal and group benefits. This theory is measured both by content analysis and computational sociology. Content analysis involves counting and describing patterns in media and involves quantitative and/or qualitative data. Computational sociology utilizes computers to collect, extract, and analyze data and it’s becoming increasingly useful in the era of big data.

the lure of identity

Henri Tajfel was a jew sent to a concentration camp during the holocaust. After he got out, he wondered what made ordinary people facilitate such violence, and turned to sociology. He discovered the minimal group paradigm, which says humans will form groups over the most trivial reasons. Through distinction, we affirm identity categories and place each other into their subcategories. Positive distinction claims that members of our own group are superior to others, and in-group bias is born from this, which is the preferential treatment of our group and the mistreatment of others. Formation of these groups are explained in social identity theory. These identities are socially constructed in this order: invent, divide, stereotype, perform, and rank.

the origin of sexual identity

Sexual minorities became an identity as opposed to a homosexual action after urbanization, industrialization, and WWII. Urbanization provided freedom in cities that the surveillance in small communities didn’t have, making cities a perfect place for gay subcultures. Industrialization moved us away from the need for children for survival. World War II left us in the company of the same sex, making homosexual encounters easier.

race, ethnicity, and the emergence of subcategories

Race is social fact rather than a biological difference. We’re socialized to look for physical attributes to identify someone’s race, and these distinctions vary from culture to culture. Similar, but separate, is ethnicity, identity based on collective memories of shared history and distinctive culture. Definitions of different races are mainly dependent on current political goals. First, colonists used race as a way to divide white and black slaves, giving whites a psychological wage and convincing them they had more in common with high class white people than low class black people. The Supreme Court has defined race on the basis of geographical location of ancestry (Ozawa), skin color (Thind), and recorded ancestry (Phipps). Various cases created the one-drop rule, saying anyone with any trace of black ancestry is considered black and should be treated as such, as well as the blood quantum rule, which limited legal recognition of Natives in order to bar those without documented ancestry from federal benefits.

filling gender subcategories with contents

Gender is the ideas, traits, and skills we associate with biological sexes. Male and female are the subcategories of gender. The idea that there are only two types of people in terms of gender is called the gender. At birth people are assigned male, female, and intersex. Non-cisgender identities include transgender and/or nonbinary. Stereotypes, are clusters of ideas attached by social convention to identities, apply to gender as well, and they emerged when home chores was separated from office work. Content analysis can be used to analyze gender stereotypes but counting and describing patterns in media. The data collected can be qualitative, quantitative, or both, and demonstrate that social constructs aren’t only in our heads. These studies can be combined into a meta-analysis, and meta-analyses can be combined into a meta-synthesis.

act your age

Acting accordance with stereotypes is referred to as doing identity, and everyone does it to an extent. Age, for example, is performed by “acting your age.” It’s considered a social construct because there is a right way to act during each age. This is exemplified by our having words to describe those who go outside the norm for their age like “teenage mom” or “single dad.” Doing age involves not just behavior, but appearance, hobbies, friends, and more. We think of age as a chronological fact, but really it’s a social one, as is any social construct.

the building of body hierarchies

When crop production doubled in 1900, anyone in America could become fat, so the rich became skinny to create positive distinction from the working class and to escape the conspicuous consumption this brought about. Fatness, then, was stigmatized, which has been the case for over a century now. This is proven by content analysis, showing fat characters are typically portrayed more negatively than their thin counterparts. Stereotypes like these can morph into controlling images, which make injustice seem normal and inevitable. This images can create prejudice, which is a learned behavior. Prejudice is created by status beliefs, that can either be explicit or implicit. Implicit beliefs can be measured by computational sociology, which uses computers to extract and analyze data from the internet, as well as build models and predict interactions on large scales.

intersectionality and disability

Social theorist Anna Julia Cooper introduced the idea of intersectionality, and the term was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw. Intersectionality describes the notion that to understand anyone and their societal perception one must account for every identity the have and how they interact, not just each identity in isolation. Interactions between identities, like gender, sexuality, body type, race, or disability, can give someone a higher or lower social standing. Combinations of identities can make someone perceived as more or less attractive, strong, motivated, kind, or able.