During the past years, the term 'deconstruction' has often come to the table. Originated by philosopher Jaques Derrida, it explains the fluid relationship between truth, language, and meaning. But why is it so important to 'deconstruct' our ideas, and how can we do it?
As a fashion supermodel on the runway, reality wears many different outfits: she dresses in black and white when in a harsh, monotone, and angry mood, and colorful when her attitude is delightful and cheerful. Her accessories change as she changes her panties or paints her nails, yet she never repeats as she takes different forms, depending on who's watching her.
For the Zapatista movement photographer Pedro Valtierra, for instance, reality has a striking heart and a spirit of demonstration; a glimpse of boycott, and revolt. When trying to capture México, he managed to pause the world for an instant, and then he sighed. With a simple click he showed that, while others enjoy private bitches and bubble baths, the Mexican state of Chiapas wore a rebellion. That was reality's outfit when he observed it through his camera lenses. He never possessed its condition, nor tried to read it, as many others believe they ought to do. He simply captured it in black and white, harsh and angry, as a denouncement and a critique of an authoritarian state. That's why he won the Princess of Asturias Photography Award and dedicated it to all murdered Mexican journalists.
As journalism tries to capture reality, it takes many different forms. As claimed by so many, it is the goal of this profession to inform the citizenship of what happens. To tell the truth. Yet the lecture of past facts changes –as realities' panties–, and as the worldviews of those writers do. While a left-sided journalist could claim that gender –for instance– is a social construction and that non-binary trans people are a reality, a right-sided one might deny any gender identity that doesn't fit into the culturally accepted gender binarism.
In either of those cases, whilst the argument's main point changes, the lecture on what is real and what matters, does too. And in that scene, dissonance, conflict, and chaos rule all social debate. So we might ask: what is shaping people's worldviews so radically different?
Opposite worldviews often relate to different perceptions of truth. Social Psychologist and Cultural Sociologist Geert Hofstede defined culture as everything that a group of people believes, thinks, finds, or assumes to know, something totally separated from a so-called 'real truth'. As a positivist himself, he believed truth to be something hidden under social norms and constructs. But, is there really a Truth (with capital 'T') out there? Or is it something we create within our different ways to narrate the world?
Cultural sociology denies the existence of solid and unique truth, but rather, defends the construction of multiple truths in different social groups. To illustrate the truth construction, let's take gender and sexual identity. Feminism has long insisted that gender is a social construction, since the meaning of a 'woman' or a 'man', varies from society to society and changes over time. On that line, all norms, behaviors, and roles assigned with being a woman or a man, a girl or a boy, as well as the relationships between each other, exist because social groups assume that's how people should act, according to their own-constructed norms.
In Sexting the body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, writer, philosopher, and biology teacher Anne Fausto-Sterling argues that "there are not two different sexes, but no less than five. So [for her] not only 'gender' is constructed, but sex is too". She explains that much of what we are told to be true historically and culturally is accidental. More accurately, culturally and socially taught. As Fausto-Sterling describes, there are no real truths out there, but rather, it is our culture that tells us what is. She defines culture as something intrinsic and learned in education, from our parents, our teachers, and probably our friends too.
The positivist notion that underneath the culture there is a more fundamental reality and that culture is not reality per se arises certain skepticism for cultural sociology. For that discipline, culture is in itself a 'hard' science and object of study in itself, because there are no formal rules needed to remind people of meanings that they take for granted. Take for instance the 'you won't kill' motto, or, to continue with the sex and gender learned rules, let's take the 'male/female' binarism.
Culturally accepted norms are usually more powerful and accepted than formal laws, as formal rules that are not rooted in culture will typically not be obeyed. Cultural understanding is needed, then, to give meaning to scientific findings in a determinate space and time, and to arrive at a social consensus in which those findings are learned and integrated.
Under that premise, how come, then, for so many years, sexual identity and gender have lived under imposed norms and shaped completely our societies? If, as Fausto-Sterling claims, even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced, why do we still insist on the so-called gender binarism?
Cultural sociology acknowledges that there will always be different groups of people who find, believe, or assume to know very different and incompatible things, as well as what those different groups of people find, believe, or assume to know is typically subject to change, within time and according to scientific and cultural claims. But from a cultural-sociological point of view, it is not even important whether ideas held by groups are 'truth', because it makes no difference at all in influencing members' actions. The important questions, then, rely on when, where, and how did a particular cultural idea emerge, which groups embraced and rejected it and for what reasons; and what wider social consequences this particular cultural idea has had till our times.
When it comes to gender and sexual identity cultural ideas, it is hard to date the time when binarisms were culturally imposed, as the male/female separation comes from as far as we have recorded western literature. However, some gender-based and decolonial studies date the imposed gender binarisms back to colonization and claim White Supremacy to be behind today's binary system.
But even if not all pre-colonial societies went beyond gender and not all western gender systems are "as insulting as our current binary one", as Kravitz, M writes in aninjusticemag, with colonialism, Europen settlers forced their strict and rigid worldviews on gender (and so many other things) to the civilizations they invaded.
So as colonialism happened, we see that beyond the physical rapes and barbarities inflicted upon pre-colonial societies, one of their (our) biggest weapons was to impose certain worldviews. And so, they (we) described what reality should look like and how reality is, leaving no space for other reality and truth perceptions than the binary white supremacist one.
Perhaps it is a very reductive view, to point out today's societal configurations up to colonialism, but it might be useful to rethink our assumed worldviews and (try) to see it from that perspective. As gender goes beyond the established binarism, and as our current laws and border configurations still perpetuate racism, there are so many ideas we might have simply assumed and learned from our cultural surroundings. And here lies the 'deconstruction' premise.
[The goal is] To deconstruct our ideas in order to construct new ones from a different perspective. Demolishing our worldviews in order to build a more inclusive perspective, one that holds historic memory, and takes into account the existence of totally different worldviews.
Perhaps it is time to destroy our perception of truth, and to construct it again (because otherwise, we get chaos) with a different view, including all those historically left behind. Perhaps this way, reality might take multiple different forms, and it will finally be able to continue its eternal revolution on the diverse fashion runway.
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