Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Toward a sociology of perception -- Expectations, selective attention, and social construction -- Filter analysis -- Selective perception and the social construction of sex -- Sexpectations and socio-mental control -- Sex difference as a social filter -- Perception and the social construction of the body -- Selective attention: what we actually see when we see sex -- Transdar and transition: transgender "expert" knowledge of sex cues -- The sound of sex -- A sex cue can be anything (as long as it provides information about sex) -- Cognitive distortions in seeing sex -- Polarization -- Blind to sameness -- Transgender narratives and the filter of transition -- A blind phenomenology of sexed bodies -- Sex differences in proportion -- Seeking sameness -- Sex without polarization -- Drawing textbooks: sameness despite polarization -- Genitals, gonads, and genes -- Sex sameness as a rhetorical strategy -- Conclusion: excess, continua, and the flexible mind -- Emphasizing excess -- The sex/gender continuum -- Cognitive flexibility -- Appendix: methodological notes

Many theories of social construction make some reference to sight, yet few offer sustained examinations of perception. In light of this, I highlight the visual dimension of the social construction of reality by analyzing visual perception as a process of 'socio-mental filtration'. Building on theories of social construction — most notably those using the concepts 'frame', 'paradigm' and 'schema' — in which expectations are the organizing force of experience, I focus on how social construction happens. One key effect of expectations is to enact selective attention, which is evocatively captured by the metaphor of a filter. Drawing on the case of sex and gender, I demonstrate that using filter analysis to identify the specific dynamics of 'socio-optical construction' — adding a concrete analysis of visual perception to the general idea of social construction — may help scholars to more effectively account for some of the 'hard problems' of constructionist theory, such as the body.

In this paper, I bring Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality into conversation with the relatively new subfield of the sociology of the senses to argue that greater attentiveness to sensory perception can enhance our understanding of the mechanisms of the social construction of reality. When read with this sensitization, one finds implicit references to the senses throughout their discussion, but nowhere is sensory perception explicitly theorized as a part of the social construction process. Drawing specifically on their analysis of primary socialization, face-to-face interaction, language and relevance structures, and the fundamental dialectic of externalization, objectivation, and internalization, I demonstrate that processes of perceptual construction – specifically sensory attention and disattention – are key mechanism of social construction underlying many of Berger and Luckmann's arguments. A more explicit focus on sensory perception not only clarifies and strengthens many of their observations, but also constitutes a renewal of their important call to examine the processes of social construction.