Sociology 3701: Outline--Week Fifteen

I. He Defies You Still--the Memoirs of a Sissy: Tommi Avicolli

"School was one of the more painful experiences of my youth. The neighborhood bullies could be avoided. The taunts of the children... could be evaded by staying in my room. But school was something I had to face day after day..."

"Some kids would talk to me, but few wanted to be known as my close friend. Afraid of labels. If I was a sissy, then he had to be a sissy."

"On the other hand, anyone could be a faggot.... It was the most commonly used put-down. It kept guys in line."

"No gay history was ever taught.... Homosexuals never contributed to the human race. God destroyed the queers in Sodom and Gomorrah. We learned about Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein.--but never that they were queer. They were not queer. Walt Whitman, the 'father of American poetry' was not queer. No one was queer."

II. Video: "After Stonewall"

"How a Republican state legislator decided to come out"

III. Resistance/mindful reconstruction

A. Modernism: the belief which began in the Enlightenment Period that a science of human behavior is possible and that with the help of reason, social problems can be addressed and solved.... optimism about progress and belief that the systems developed in western Europe and the United States (capitalism, democracy, rationalization, respect for human rights) are the eventual future for the whole world.

B. Postmodernism: the belief that all knowledge systems are partial and based in social location (race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality)... that there is not ultimate truth (maybe even in the physical sciences but certainly in the realm of the social)... pessimism about any concept of progress and about any kind of social evolutionary theories... Nietzsche, Foucault, Baudrillard

C. Deconstructionism: the analysis of a social arrangement or idea in terms of the way it privileges a particular social class, gender, race, sexuality, or nationality.

D. Creativity, resistance, and "truth"

1. When we don't recognize the human potential for social creativity, we end up functioning as social robots... treating the norms of our culture as if they were the laws of nature... accepting its inequality systems, with all their negative implications for the way we treat each other and the way we see ourselves.

2. But when we do acknowledge social creativity and the way social knowledge and social reality reflect position in the various stratification systems, there is also a danger: extreme relativism and cynicism. This is the worst side of deconstructionism.

3. What is our alternative? O'Brien: "Mindful reconstruction"

a. Just because cultural forms are human creations doesn't make them any less essential.

b. Human institutions always in danger of getting too rigid; human institutions always advantage some groups at the expense of others... need for reform or even revolution at times.

c. The role of the social psychologist as a practical change expert (or perhaps more accurately, someone who is working to build up that expertise).

For example, my own activities: protest movements, cooperatives, church, family... informed by my reading of sociology and by my experiences but with a full awareness of the possibilities (and dangers ) of social creativity.... sometimes it does seem to me that "faith" is a human construction, but that doesn't remove my need for faith... step by step process of trying to become the person I mean to be, not as a process of individual self-creation, but through my relationships with other people