Blog Post 5

Social construction was never something I really understood or talked about in any other of my classes. It is really interesting to me, hearing several different versions of it and making up my own from all these different sources. This really funny because my roommate is taking a multicultural education class and she just had to right a paper over this and we were discussing it a couple weeks ago. I really have enjoyed the activities we did in class the past week. I think they helped a lot to get everybody in the zone for the new project. 

I saw social construction play apart in every text that I have read or listened to in the past week. Some of them are in similar was and others are in different ways. Hanfler's article, as my base, I can see examples in the different texts that explain what Hanfler was talking about in his article. In one instance Hanfler said "We learn meanings. Parents, teachers, friends, coaches, the media and so forth teach us our initial interpretation of the world. the process begins at birth…" (24). This quote from Hanfler's article really relates to what Lorber was talking about in her article. She is saying that since day one we categorize people as either female or male and they don't get a choice to grow up and found out which one they want to be. Hanfler and Lorber also talk about how influences of the outside world guide you into female or male. What I mean is when a child is little you, as the parent, give them toys to play with. If they are girls, they normally get dolls and boys get cars. This shows that form a young age you already know, based on influences, what gender you are. There is a great example of this in the radio cast I listened to about football. There was a mom and her son being interviewed about football. The mom really pushed her son to play football, because that's what all her brothers, dad, uncles did. Come to find out after a season or two the son didn't want to play football anymore. In the interview he said he really enjoyed swimming and wanted to try synchronize swimming. His mom and the interviewer just laughed at him thinking it was a joke, but the kid was serious. This is an example of saying that since that young boy was male he should play a tough sport like football not synchronize swimming, because that is more a girl's activity. 

We could take the same quote from Hanfler's article and relate it something else completely different. In Young's article he is talking about language. There was one quote in particular that really caught my attention. "If he meant everybody should be thrilled to learn another dialect, then wouldnt everybody be learnin everybody’s dialect?" (111). In this paragraph, Young was dissecting a quote from Fish's New York Times article. Fish is saying that everybody should be excited to learn a new language. Young's argument back is that if they have to adopt standard english when they write, shouldn't other dialects be adopted too. This goes into what Hanfler was saying about learning meaning from outside influences such as teachers. In school we learn that in order to write a good paper, we must write in standard english. Young is arguing that why we don't adopt other dialects, but expect people to drop their own and learn ours. These are both examples of social construction coming from many different texts and there are tons more.