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Chapter 4. Social Construction: The Discursive Self
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Chapter 4 Social Construction: The Discursive Self On turning to poststructuralist and postmodern theory with my research agenda in mind, I discovered-as in the mass communication fielda wide range of theories addressing the issues that interested me. As I delved into the literature, I decided to focus on the social constructionists for two reasons. (1) These theorists grounded their work on giants of European thought whose insights generated most postmodern and poststructuralist theory, and whose thought also lies at the roots of cultural studies work; and (2) they were particularly interested in the issue of identity. My initial intuition was that talk about 90210 involved identity work for teens and college students, and I became convinced that the ways social constructionists talked about identity would help clarify and solidify my analysis. Social construction begins by questioning Western culture's notion that we each have a unique inner self that is the author of our private thoughts and feelings. While our ideas and emotions may be private in the sense of not necessarily communicated to others, social construction points to ways that culture and language "author" them, not solely we ourselves. Our inner life is not wholly the product of the autonomous self, but rather is shaped by the ways we have to express it, and by the communities that give it meaning. The pleasure or pain we feel around an event or object stems in large measure from the way it is valued in our community. A helpful example might be the way we take for granted our notions of what is appropriate. We can be outraged, disgusted, or embarrassed by inappropriate behavior. These sensations are "ours"- but they arise from a communal agreement on what is appropriate. American women sometimes feel intensely uncomfortable at the notion of the topless beaches that many Europeans take for granted. While our sense of discomfort and/or embarrassment can be powerful and meaningful, in an important way we are not the "authors" of these feelings. Instead, Social Construction: The Discursive Self 49 they arise in large measure out of a communal agreement on what these sensations are called and when they are appropriate. Social constructionists emphasize the importance of language and other symbol systems in creating and maintaining "reality." Agreement on what is appropriate beach-wear is continually constructed, negotiated , and bolstered by, for example, media images and interpersonal talk. In this sense, then, symbolic representations including language work to construct our notion of what is real. Talk is action. As Edwards and Potter (1992) put it, "In saying and writing things, people perform social actions" (p. 28). Or, as Berger and Luckmann (1967) more picturesquely state: Language now constructs immense edifices of symbolic representations that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life like gigantic presences from another world.... Language is capable not only of constructing symbols that are highly abstracted from everyday experience, but also of "bringing back" these symbols and appresenting them as objectively real elements in everyday life. In this manner, symbolism and symbolic language become essential constituents of the reality of everyday life and of the commonsense apprehension of this reality. (pp. 40-41) Culture, language, and other signs impinge also on our identity-who we think, and say, we are. The self is a "construction" of language and communal meaning. This chapter begins by exploring the workings of this process, which I call the discursive construction of identity. A key theme in this discussion, and one that will be central to my study, is the nature and inlportance of narrative in identity construction and community formation. Therefore, this chapter also explores some of the ways narratives offer us to construct ourselves and our world, and it gives an overview of some dominant narratives that structure Western culture. In addition, dominant notions of female identity within those narratives are outlined. Finally, I revisit the issue of agency. Discourse, Self-Narrative, and Community The discursive construction of self has been explored by a long line of theorists such as Wittgenstein, Adorno, Horkheimer, Saussure, Habermas , and Derrida. This approach directly challenges the traditional psychological practices that are cultural currency in the Western world, which posit an individual who is self-contained and separate from others, possessed of a unique inner life that can be revealed to others through the relatively transparent medium of language (for an explanation of this position, cf. Edwards and Potter 1992). Social constructionists challenge this psychological model. Sampson (1992), for example, went so 50...