Political Self

Relevance of Otherness

• Otherness is important in social analyses involving the formation of majority and minority identities. This is because it sheds light on the responsibilities of the group with a greater political power, which control the representations of different groups.
  • They concept can be used to break down ideologies that maintain superior social identities.
  • The concept is also used for examining the nature of the competition for social identities.
• Societies establish identity categories by using the notion of otherness or a binary opposites

Quote Explaining The Other

Woman is the other of man, animal is the other of human, stranger is the other of native, abnormality the other of norm, deviation the other of law-abiding, illness the other of health, insanity the other of reason, lay public the other of the expert, foreigner the other of state subject, enemy the other of friend

— Bauman (1991)

Social Identities

• Social identities are learned and are not intrinsic.
  • They are learned through social interactions, which engender self-reflection and shape our self-image and behavior
• Social identities display how individuals and groups internalize social categories.
• A major component of our sense of identity and social belongingness is our perception of similarities and differences with respect to different groups.

Gender

• Gender exemplifies the other and how socialization constructs our thoughts on what it means to be a man and to be a woman.
  • There is an unequal relationship between these two categories, in that, they are set up as opposites without recognizing the alternative gender expressions (i.e., woman is the other of man). For this reason, masculinity is socially constructed as the norm in which social ideas about humanity are defined. In other words, the definition of a woman is derived from being the opposite of a man.

Quote Highlighting the Unequal Relationship Between Man and Woman

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being… She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the Absolute - she is the other.

— Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

Power

• Dichotomies of otherness are treated as natural despite being socially constructed. These social identities give rise to a hierarchy/social order in which one group is established as superior to others.
• How one’s identity is defined/formed/chosen is contingent on both the choice of the individual and the negotiation of power relationships.
  • Social identities are relational in nature—they are contingent on the other—and, as such, they rarely can be defined on their own.
  • Identity claims usually involve an expectation of gain or loss; hence, different groups compete for identities. It implies power which favors one group, the self, over the other (superiority and inferiority is often embedded in specific identities).¹
• Social institutions (i.e., law, religion, the media, and etc.) has the capacity to balance the power through visual representations, in which the dominant group determines whether to portray the differences in a positive or negative light.

Sources

1. Zuleyka Zevallos, OTHER Sociologist, “What is Otherness?” - 2011-10-14, archived on 2024-05-12

Footnotes

1. I believe that “contesting for identities” pertains to the determination of which group becomes the norm and which group becomes the other. ↩