Resisting Reality

Social Construction and Social Critique

Bibliographic Data

ID5810293
AuthorsSally Haslanger (0000-0002-3898-4266, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, corresponding author), Sally Anne Haslanger
Year2012
Pages512
Publication date2012-10-11
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
Reviewed byResisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, María Salas Root, 2013
VenueResisting reality (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199892631.001.0001
OpenAlexW4243152066
Open LibraryOL25101848M
ISBN9780199892631
LanguageEN
Citations received588

Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. The central chapters of the book offer critical social realist accounts of gender and race. These accounts function as case studies for a broader approach that draws upon notions of ideology, practice, and social structure developed through interdisciplinary engagement with research in social science. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional chapters in the book situate a critical realist approach in relation to philosophical methodology, and to debates in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Feminism · Identity (music) · Ideology · Injustice · Interpretation (philosophy · Meaning (existential) · Mythology · Natural (archaeology · Normative · Ontology · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Social constructionism · Social reality · Social science · Social structure · Sociology · Strict constructionism · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Critical Realism in Sociology · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology · Social Psychology · 300/.1 · Critical theory · Hm1093 .h38 2012 · Social sciences

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