Blind to Sameness
Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies
224 pages
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19 halftones, 4 line drawings, 11 tables
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6 x 9
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© 2013
What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but Asia Friedman pushes this question further still. How, she asks, did we come to blind ourselves to sex sameness?
Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations—the blind and the transgendered—Blind to Sameness answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing Friedman to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.
Ralph LaRossa | author of The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History
“Asia Friedman has produced a work of significant value. Focusing on the sensory mechanisms that contribute to the creation and classification of male and female bodies, she convincingly shows that socially crafted distinctions depend not just on the amplification and polarization of recognizable differences but also on the diminishment of apparent similarities. The first sociological study to empirically examine how conventional ways of not seeing—or filtering out—are indispensable to both the social construction of sex in particular and the social construction of reality in general. Blind to Sameness cuts to the core of how people think and wonderfully illuminates how optical communities in diverse sets of circumstances envisage and categorize the world.”
Wayne Brekhus | author of Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity
“Blind to Sameness is a remarkable and highly original book! For theorists and empiricists alike this is a masterful empirical work in the social construction of reality and a fine example that theorist and researcher need not be mentally separated.”
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Cognitive Science: Human and Animal Cognition
Sociology: General Sociology | Social Psychology--Small Groups
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