This is a collection of questions, links, and readings around the idea that many social categories we take to be natural are actually effects, or the results of various forces of social construction. Many of the essays in Beyond Borders, for example, work from the assumption that race is not a true biological or scientific category, but instead a concept that has invented ways of categorizing and differentiating between bodies for historically specific reasons.

Many scholars and cultural theorists today make the same argument about dualistic gender systems (male/female), dualistic sexuality terms (heterosexual/homosexual), and the concept of able/disabled bodies. Scholars are also researching the ways in which socio-economic positions, or class, have been invented as "natural" for certain human beings. Such arguments become even more complex when one considers that individuals exist as living intersections or combinations of all these social categories.

Cyberspace has become an important location in which these ideas are produced, discussed, disseminated, and exemplified. Some archival sites give us evidence of the different constructions of racial categories in different times and places, or different markers of gender difference in different historical moments. Some academic sites flesh out the social construction arguments mentioned briefly above. Some activist sites work to resist the effects of particular constructions of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class.

Questions and Activities

1. Pick one of the archival sites and one of the academic sites below. Explore the information they offer on the formation of race, gender, sexuality, ability, or class at an earlier historical moment in time and space. What do they teach you about the formation of a particular social category at that time and in those circumstances? What purpose did the construction serve? In whose interests (or to whose advantage) did it function? What forms of literature and media did people use to construct it? What forms of literature and media did people use to resist or struggle against it? What kinds of images did they produce? What sorts of metaphors circulate in their rhetoric?
   
   
2. Pick one of the activist sites below and study its relation to the formation of some sort of socially constructed category. Do activist groups appropriate a pejorative name or category to create community and unity or in order to organize politically? How do they use the Internet to reconstruct their community's identity?
   
   

Web-Text Connections

On the Web		In Beyond Borders
1.	Archival Sites American Memory Project. Contains numerous archival documents relevant to this activity. See, for example, the collections titled, "Votes for Women, Suffrage Pictures 1850-1920" and "Slaves and the Courts: 1740-1860." The African American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture The History Net, for example has a page on fashion, e.g. women and bicycles.	1.	Although Chapter 1, Borders of Identity: Stories of the Self, seems the most focused on questions of identity, pieces throughout Beyond Borders give examples of historically specific formations of race (or color), ethnicity, gender, and other ways of categorizing factors of identity. Margery Garber's "Vested Interests" charts and analyzes histories of cross-dressing. Karima Kamal's "An Egyptian Girl in America" exemplifies the process of defining ethnicity in relation to its other, to a different culture. Wen Shu Lee's "One Whiteness Veils Three Ugliness" translates Taiwanese linguistic and cultural constructions of colorism and gendered identity. Many of the images in Border Visions point out these constructions and satirize them.
2.	Academic Sites Southern Culture: Race in the South The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Brown University Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia The David Driskell Center	2.	Many of the selections that focus on constructions of identity are academic and theoretical essays: Stuart Hall's "Ethnicity: Identity and Difference" defines new ethnicity as something mutable and porous. Robert Berkhofer, Jr.'s, "The White Man's Indian" and Frantz Fanon's "The Fact of Blackness" investigate inventions of race in colonial situations.
3.	Activist Sites Libertarian group American Indian Movement Governing Council RAINBO: Research, Action, and Information Network for the Bodily Integrity of Women	3.	Many of the essays in Chapter 5 are examples of activist re-inventions of identity. Gloria Anzaldúa theorizes a new mestiza and William Greider's piece could be used to examine historically specific forms of class hierarchy. It would also be interesting to use Bob Blauner's "Talking Past Each Other: Black and White Languages About Race" (from Chapter 3) in conjunction with this Web research.

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