Blind to Sameness

Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies

Asia Friedman

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226023632, 9780226023465
• eBook ISBN: 9780226023779
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

ONE

Toward a Sociology of Perception

There is always more than one way to see something. This was the fundamental insight of Bronislaw Malinowski’s observation that the Trobriand Islanders usually perceived children as resembling their father, even when he saw stronger resemblances to the mother.¹ It is also supported by experimental research on cultural differences in sensory perception spanning at least half a century. For instance, James Bagby’s 1957 study found that when presented with two different images simultaneously, one depicting a scene from US culture (such as a baseball game) and one depicting a comparable scene from Mexican culture (such as a bullfight), Mexicans and Americans selectively perceive the scene from their own culture.² Similar research demonstrated that people from India and people from the United States tend to recall different details of wedding ceremonies, and that East Asians are more likely to attend to a broad perceptual field, while Westerners tend to center their attention on a focal object.³

Such optical diversity, however, is not just cross-cultural. Different historical periods can also constitute distinct “optical communities.”⁴ This is the enduring conclusion of Ludwik Fleck’s argument that historically distinct “thought styles” resulted in different interpretations of the same bacterial cultures,⁵ as well as Thomas Kuhn’s observation that scientists perceive the exact same instruments and experimental materials differently under different historical “paradigms.” As Kuhn describes: “After the assimilation of Franklin’s paradigm, the electrician looking at a Leyden jar saw something different from what he had seen before. The device had become a condenser, for which neither the jar shape nor glass was required. . . . Lavoisier . . . saw oxygen where Priestly had seen desophlostated air and where others had seen nothing at all.”⁶

Visual perception of the same sensory information also varies within the same culture and the same historical period. Gender, race, class, occupations, and even hobbies can all entail distinct perceptual conventions and forms of perceptual expertise. Studies of eyewitness accounts, for instance, have found that males and females tend to notice different aspects of a scene and thereby remember somewhat different details.⁷ An extensive array of research also demonstrates that people are much better at recognizing faces of their own race or ethnic group.⁸ In the case of occupations, Charles Goodwin writes about the development and use of “professional vision,”⁹ adding support to Fleck’s prior argument that scientific training includes visual socialization through which scientists gain a “readiness for directed perception.”¹⁰ As N. R. Hanson put it, “The infant and the layman can see: they are not blind. But they cannot see what the physicist sees; they are blind to what he sees.”¹¹ Consider in this context the perceptual expertise of radiologists described by Jerome Groopman: “The flux of white specks across a black background makes the discrete outlines of organs difficult, if not impossible, for me to make out. Of course, for . . . radiologists who use this technology daily, the images are as familiar as the palms of their hands, and the contrasts of black, white, and gray full of meaning.”¹² The same is true of other professions, which is why C. Wright Mills argues that “different technical elites possess different perceptual capacities.”¹³ Scholars have offered similar observations about the optical socialization involved in pursuing different hobbies. Gary Fine, for instance, found that mushroom hunters perceive amazing amounts of sensory detail invisible to the uninitiated, who lack the relevant “template for looking.”¹⁴ Finally, Pierre Bourdieu has argued that class position is attended by “perceptual schemes” that structure aesthetic judgments about art, among other things.¹⁵

Despite these accounts of diverse optical communities at almost every level of analysis, very few sustained sociological examinations of perception have emerged. Each of the optical communities alluded to above gives rise to perceptual patterns that are neither individual nor universally human. Rather, these patterns are the result of “optical socialization,” constituting a characteristically sociological dimension of visual perception.¹⁶ The distinct scope and focus of the sociology of perception is the intermediate level of analysis between “perceptual individualism” and “perceptual universalism,” which consists of the many perceptual norms, perceptual traditions, and processes of perceptual enculturation associated with membership in different social groups. In other words, the sociology of perception ignores perceptual idiosyncrasies but does not assume everyone perceives in a universal way. Given what we already know, the most interesting questions to be addressed by the sociology of perception do not have to do with whether culture influences perception, which has been at least preliminarily established, but with how—through what kinds of sociocognitive and perceptual processes—this optical diversity is created.

Among the most important reasons to develop a more comprehensive sociology of perception is that it challenges the taken-for-granted epistemology of sight—the assumption that our visual perceptions are a complete, unaltered reflection of the sensory stimuli provided by the empirical world, which largely endures despite growing acknowledgment in both the social and cognitive sciences that sensory perceptions are never unmediated by concepts. Before going further, then, it may be helpful to more fully define this “commonsense” view. It is typically assumed that seeing is a passive input process in which sensory stimuli are the only influence. In this understanding, seeing does not involve thinking or interpretation but is a matter of direct sensory perception.¹⁷ The metaphor that best captures this folk theory of sight is the mirror, which suggests that what is seen is a mirror image of empirical reality without distortion or selection.¹⁸

This constellation of beliefs also leads us to trust sight uniquely among the senses. Many sayings reflect this faith in vision: “I saw it with my own eyes”; “sight unseen”; “seeing is believing”; “a picture is worth a thousand words.” In this way, sight is elevated over the other senses in terms of its ability to provide accurate information about a perceptual object. Sayings that capture this association between vision and truth are to “have vision,” to “see the light,” and to “see things as they really are.”¹⁹

Despite the many examples of different optical communities, then, people are often unaware of sociocultural influences on visual perception. A sociology of perception challenges the taken-for-granted folk theories of sight that do not acknowledge socio-optical diversity or its epistemological implications.

Another important reason to examine sensory perception sociologically is that perception is a powerful but understudied dimension of the social construction of reality. For instance, in The Social Construction of Reality, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann make the claim that conversation is the most important vehicle of reality maintenance;²⁰ perception, on the other hand, does not receive any explicit acknowledgment as playing a role in the social construction process. There is no entry in the index under perception, vision, visual, sensory, or senses. Yet many passages, such as the one that follows, seem to demand an analysis of the social construction of perception: “The reality of every day life is taken for granted as reality. It does not require additional verification over and beyond its simple presence. It is simply there, as self-evident and compelling facticity. I know that it is real.”²¹ Yet how do we gain this “knowledge” that reality is “simply there” without needing additional verification? How do we come to experience it as “real”? It is through perception that information enters our minds in the first place. As such, subconscious cultural influences at the level of perception undergird this broadly shared analytic perspective, as well as a number of related sociological subfields such as the sociology of knowledge. As Eviatar Zerubavel says in relation to cognitive sociology, “A good way to begin exploring the mind would be to examine the actual process by which the world ‘enters’ it in the first place. The first step toward establishing a comprehensive sociology of the mind, therefore, would be to develop a sociology of perception.”²² Yet there is currently no coherent sociological subfield devoted to perception.

Despite the very limited number of works specifically sailing under the banner of “the sociology of perception”²³—taking the social construction of perception as their central object of analysis—one can find references to sensory perception throughout classical and contemporary sociology. Georg Simmel offers one of the more extended discussions of the sociological importance of the senses, arguing that vision plays a unique sociological role because “the union and interaction of individuals is based upon mutual glances.”²⁴ Perception also plays an important role in much of Erving Goffman’s thinking (e.g., the concept of civil inattention)²⁵ and in Harold Garfinkel’s work on “background” knowledge.²⁶ Other sociologists who have explicitly argued for the centrality of perception to sociological inquiry include Arthur Child, who claims that perception buttresses the sociology of knowledge;²⁷ Donald Lowe, who offers that perception is the link between the content of thought and the structure of society;²⁸ and, more recently, Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul, and Simon Gottschalk, who argue that the senses and sensations are “the key form of humans’ active construction of the world.”²⁹ There are also traces of a sociology of perception in the classical sociological concepts of collective conscience,³⁰ class consciousness,³¹ and collective attention.³² Given this long history of nods to the role of perception in social life—not to mention the outright statements of its sociological significance—the topic is ripe for a more extended treatment.

A sociological analysis of sensory perception can be approached in a number of different ways. One strategy is to systematically capture and catalog varying perceptions of the same object, analyzing the structures of attention involved in alternate ways of seeing (or hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching) the same thing. Another approach is to document historical shifts in perceptual conventions and the primacy of different senses.³³ A third important area of inquiry is to investigate the ways perception gets enlisted in other processes of social construction (of reality, of race, of gender, of aesthetic judgment, and so on). These projects do not exhaust the concerns of a sociology of perception, which can include any work examining perception as a social process, as well as those using “sensuous” research methods attentive to the researcher’s embodied perceptual experience.³⁴

Here I employ a cognitive sociological approach, emphasizing the link between perception and cognition and highlighting the sociocultural organization of both. Although there is some debate surrounding the timing and the extent to which the different senses are penetrated by cognition and culture, there is broad agreement that cognition shapes perception at some level prior to consciously experienced sensations.³⁵ As Harry Lawless put it in relation to olfactory perception, it is not just a matter of “how well the nose is working” but also “how well the brain that is hooked to the nose is working.”³⁶ Strictly speaking, what human beings see, feel, taste, touch, and smell is not the world per se but a version of the world their minds have created.³⁷ In light of this, in this book I explore the ways social patterns of thought create mental templates for the perceptual construction of reality.

Expectations, Selective Attention, and Social Construction

Scholars have used a variety of concepts to describe the social construction of reality, including paradigms,³⁸ perspectives,³⁹ styles,⁴⁰ models,⁴¹ schemas,⁴² mental maps,⁴³ habitus,⁴⁴ frames,⁴⁵ and filters.⁴⁶ Deborah Tannen suggested that the notion of expectat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraphs
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Toward a Sociology of Perception
• 2. Selective Perception and the Social Construction of Sex
• 3. Selective Attention—What We Actually See When We See Sex
• 4. Blind to Sameness
• 5. Seeking Sameness
• Conclusion: Excess, Continua, and the Flexible Mind
• Appendix: Methodological Notes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index