Race, gender, families, scientific facts, sexuality, nationalism, and reality: What might they have in common? One commonality is that they are all socially constructed. What do sociologists mean when they say something is a social construct? At the most basic level, social constructionism, or the social construction of reality, means “what we take to be the truth about the world importantly depends on the social relationships of which we are a part” (Gergen 2018:7). Humans make meaning collectively. It’s something we are socialized into from birth. In this section, we will explore several traditions that focus on meaning-making and its connection to social reality.

4.2.1 Social Constructionism: The Basics

One of the more influential takes on social constructionism emerged from the work of Austrian-American sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. In their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, they argued that society is created by humans and human interaction, which they call habitualization. Habitualization describes how “any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be … performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort” (Berger and Luckmann 1966).

Habits allow us to efficiently go about our day to day lives. If we had to start from scratch everyday, our lives would be weighed down by way too many choices. For example, most days each of us probably has a morning routine we follow, oftentimes not thinking about it too much. This allows us to prepare for our day in a timely manner.

Not only do we construct our own society but we also accept it as it is because others have created it before us. Society is, in fact, “habit.” For example, your school exists as a school and not just as a building because you and others agree that it is a school. If your school is older than you are, it was created by the agreement of others before you. In a sense, it exists by consensus, both prior and current. This is an example of the process of institutionalization, the act of implanting a convention or norm into society. Bear in mind that the institution, while socially constructed, is still quite real.

Once meanings are institutionalized they may appear durable or even “natural.” Through socialization, which we will explore in more detail below, people learn these institutionalized meanings and become members of their society.

Another way of looking at this concept is through William I. and Dorothy S. Thomas’s notable Thomas theorem which states, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928). That is, people’s behavior can be determined by their subjective construction of reality rather than by objective reality. For example, a teenager who is repeatedly given a label—overachiever, player, bum—might live up to the term even though it initially wasn’t a part of their character. Or if we took something like race, even though it is socially constructed, people believe it is real. As a result it has real life consequences, especially when considering access to opportunities.

4.2.2 Constructionism and Cross-Cultural Comparisons

Because we live enmeshed within our own cultures, it can be difficult to see how reality is constructed by the society to which we belong. One way to practice seeing how our immediate society constructs segments of its reality is by applying a constructionist lens to cultures outside of our own.

4.2.2.1 The Social Construction of Beauty

Let’s explore this with the social construction of beauty. In 1949, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published the book, The Second Sex. There, she introduced the idea that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” A woman becomes one through men’s construction of femininity and the feminine ideal. Both constructs, she explained, serve men’s economic and physical ends. Beauty itself has been determined by men, Beauvoir would say. As a result, society emphasizes women’s bodies and prioritizes them being on display. Along with this, women are socialized into accepting a more passive role in life, except for actively tending to their appearance.

In this 2-minute video, Beauty is a Social Construct [YouTube Video], pay attention to the ways Beauvoir and the narrator describe how this social construct shows up in real life (figure 4.2). That is, what behaviors do they point out are related to the social construction of beauty?

Figure 4.2. Beauty is a Social Construct [YouTube Video]

Beauvoir held an activist stance, encouraging women to reject male expectations of beauty and femininity. She asserted that women shouldn’t have to act, engage, or present themselves to please men. She also suggested that resistance to male stereotypes of beauty can mean greater equality.

Beauvior criticized Western society’s patriarchy, a system in which men hold power. She advocated for the destruction of patriarchal institutions and was critical of the Western practice of the traditional nuclear family. Living in France, this was the society in which she lived and evaluated. But, how do other societies construct beauty and femininity? Do societies that are not patriarchal construct beauty differently?

4.2.2.2 Beauty Across Time and Culture

Researchers have shown that people’s sense of beauty varies across time and culture. Throughout cultures across the world, people exaggerate the features of beauty that their culture deems attractive. Ideal characteristics differ across cultures, such as neck length, foot size, and lip size. It does illustrate the cultural evaluation of beauty and the (often painful) techniques used to achieve the unnaturally extreme forms of beauty. What notions of female beauty in your culture might be similar to or different from conceptions of beauty found in the video Feminine Beauty: A Social Construct [YouTube Video]?

4.2.2.3 Examples of Beauty

We don’t have to look extensively to find societies that express beauty differently than in Western culture. Figure 4.3 shows a bronze sculpture of a woman named Ilchee, or Moon Woman, who was born in the late 1700s. She was a member of Chinook Nation in present day Oregon and Washington and was the daughter of an influential chief. The sculpture is installed along the waterfront in Vancouver, Washington, and was designed by the sculptor Eric Jensen to honor the Chinook people who lived in the area for thousands of years. Jensen represented Ilchee looking toward her family’s ancestral home nearby.

As a child, Ilchee’s caretakers bound her head in order to create the striking angle of her profile. The elite of some Chinook tribes practiced head binding as a mark of social status as well as to enhance their sense of beauty. In some tribes the heads of children were bound, regardless of the gender, and in some tribes, the heads of girls were given more attention to flattening (Ruby and Brown 1993, Dingwall 1931).

Another example of the social construction of beauty can be seen in the preference for yaeba in Japan. Yaeba refers to teeth, especially the upper canines, that have one tooth overlapping another, or protruding from a spot higher in the gum as shown in figure 4.4. To some, this may portray a fang-like appearance. To many in Japan, it is considered a mark of youthfulness and natural beauty. It has recently become a trend for teenage girls to have dental procedures to create or emphasize this look. Others point to it as an expression of the Japanese traditional aesthetic of wabi, which is a consideration of beauty in imperfect things; in simplicity and authenticity (Yaeba Dentistry: The Appeal of Pointy Teeth 2018).

Figure 4.4. Yaeba: Perfectos dientes imperfectos” (“Yaeba: Perfect imperfect teeth”) [YouTube Video]

How do other cultures see the sense of beauty from the United States? Tanning to achieve the ultimate sun-kissed look is considered an odd practice by women from cultures that prioritize fair and porcelain-like skin. Similarly the U.S. preference for very straight and very white teeth is sometimes seen as obsessive and overly uniform (Barford 2022). Professor Jimmy Steele of the School of Dental Science at Newcastle University finds that,

U.S. teeth are sometimes whiter than it is physically possible to get in nature—
there is a new reality out there. The most extreme tooth bleaching is terrifying,
it looks like it’s painted with gloss paint and has altered what people perceive as
normal. (Barford 2022)

What other ways might societies outside of the United States find the U.S. social construction of beauty peculiar? What other ways can you identify the social construction of beauty in other cultures?

4.2.3 Symbolic Interactionism

Let’s revisit symbolic interactionism that we first discussed in Chapter 2. As Herbert Blumer (1969:2) stated, symbolic interactionism was based on the following premises:

• Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things.
• The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society.
• These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters.

Interactionists are concerned with how meanings are constructed through interactions with others. We attach meanings to situations, roles, relationships, and most things in our lives whenever we encounter them. For a symbolic interaction between people to occur, these meanings to some extent have to be shared and agreed upon with the people you are interacting with.

4.2.4 Ethnomethodology

Another micro-level theory that can help explain our daily interactions is ethnomethodology. In simple terms, ethnomethodology is the study of everyday folk methods, how we go about ordering our day-to-day lives. Oftentimes, how we organize our lives is taken for granted and can be hard to explain. Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, developed an approach to showing the hidden rules for how we live our lives. He called these breaching experiments. In breaching experiments, the experimenter goes out in public and breaks everyday unspoken rules and expectations. The breaking of unspoken rules helps reveal people’s expectations. The experiment also shows how people will repair interactions once an unspoken rule has been broken. As an example, say you and your classmates started dancing Laxed (Siren Beat) [TikTok] through the library. How do you think people in the library would respond? What norms related to libraries might this impromptu dance party reveal?