SOCI 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Body Modification, Skin Whitening, Susan Bordo
17 Jun 2016
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Document Summary
Although it is impossible to generalize across very different thinkers, there are some common elements within postmodernist thought, which have come to be of crucial importance. First is the insistence on how our relations to the world are mediated. Our understanding of the world is mediated through idea concepts, by the ways in which we make sense of them. Man and woman are not just labels for kinds of things already ordered independently from us. What counts as a man or woman will depend on the meanings we give to these terms. This recognition is connected to another, point, which is that the meanings that we give to these categories are never fixed or closed. They can vary according to the context in which they emerge and can vary over time. The recognition of differences with the categories of woman and man also reflects the complexities and contradictions within the individual subject.
