3 OUR IDENTITIES
IN THIS CHAPTER...
TO BE HUMAN is to be cultural, and to be cultural is to give the world around us meaning. Part of that process involves giving meaning to one another. Social identities—our race and ethnicity, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, class, age, religion, disability, body size, and more—are culturally influenced social constructs too.
- This chapter shows how we collectively make certain features of humans socially important and carve out subcategories in which to place ourselves. These subcategories are then imbued with meaning (or stereotypes) and arrayed in a hierarchy.
- Part of having a social identity is acting in ways that reflect it. Sometimes we enjoy doing so and sometimes we only do so because others expect us to and reward or punish us accordingly.
- We all carry not just one but many social identities, and our lives are shaped by all these identities at once. This fact is referred to as intersectionality.
Altogether, sociological observations about identity reflect social identity theory: People are inclined to form social groups, incorporate group membership into their identity, take steps to enforce group boundaries, and maximize personal esteem and in-group success.
Two research methods are helpful for documenting shared cultural beliefs about identities:
- Content analysis involves counting and describing patterns or themes in media. Analysis can be quantitative, qualitative, or both.
- Computational sociology uses computers to collect, extract, and analyze data. It has become especially useful in the era of big data, extremely large and growing repositories of information.
“The Western world is having an identity crisis.”
English offers an elaborate language with which we can express our sexual attraction. We can describe ourselves as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, demisexual, pansexual, polysexual, ambisexual, omnisexual, androsexual, gynesexual, skoliosexual, or even asexual. For those who prefer ambiguity, there’s queer or fluid. And if we aren’t quite sure, there’s curious and questioning.
This is new. In the early 1600s, when the Puritans landed on the east coast of what would become the United States, there were exactly zero words for sexual orientation in English.1 It hadn’t occurred to the colonists that people could be categorized according to their sexual desire, so the subcategories of homosexual and heterosexual didn’t yet exist.
They realized, of course, that sometimes people had sex with people of the same sex, but it hadn’t occurred to them that such activity could reflect an identity. Instead, such behavior was lumped together with masturbation, adultery, and oral and anal sex. It was sin, they believed, and something to which everyone was susceptible. Accordingly, while Puritans who felt same-sex desire may have experienced pleasure or shame, they would not have paused to wonder if they were a different kind of person altogether.
It remained this way for another 300 years. What happened next is a matter of economics, urbanization, war, science, politics, and more. It’s one of many stories you’ll read in this chapter about our social identities, the socially constructed categories and subcategories of people in which we place ourselves or are placed by others.2 Our social identities can be intensely private, deeply personal, and profoundly intimate, but we don’t come to them in a vacuum. Just like other parts of human life, our identities are social constructs: Our cultures invent them, provide the subcategories, and give them meaning and value.
Sociologists are particularly interested in social identities that carry substantial social significance and consequence. Not identities like “cat people” and “foodies,” but ones like race, citizenship, gender, class, age, religion, disability, and body size. These identities matter. We read other people’s appearances, body language, accents, turns of phrase, and fashion choices for signs of these identities and tend to filter information about people through them.
Our identities are also tethered to unfair advantage and disadvantage. Many identities (such as race) have their origins in efforts to divide and conquer subjugated populations. Others (like thinness) are used to affirm superiority. Some identities are or have been criminalized (like homosexuality) or targeted for genocide (as were the Jews during the Holocaust). White and non-White, male and female, citizen and foreigner, able-bodied and disabled, straight and gay—these are some of the differences on which value is unevenly distributed. Each distinction serves to justify a hierarchy, and they interact to shape our experience in life.
This chapter will explore the process of distinction, and the social construction of identity categories. It will also review how we make identities meaningful, array them into hierarchies, and learn cultural biases. To begin our journey through this material, we start with the idea of forming human groups.
Glossary
Endnotes
- Francis J. Bremer and Tom Webster, eds., Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006).Return to reference 1
- Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Peggy A. Thoits and Lauren K. Virshup, Me’s and We’s: Forms and Functions of Social Identities, in Self and Identity: Fundamental Issues, eds. R. D. Ashmore and L. Jussim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).Return to reference 2