Many theories of social construction make some reference to sight, yet few offer sustained examinations of perception. In light of this, I highlight the visual dimension of the social construction of reality by analyzing visual perception as a process of ‘socio-mental filtration’. Building on theories of social construction — most notably those using the concepts ‘frame’, ‘paradigm’ and ‘schema’ — in which expectations are the organizing force of experience, I focus on how social construction happens. One key effect of expectations is to enact selective attention, which is evocatively captured by the metaphor of a filter. Drawing on the case of sex and gender, I demonstrate that using filter analysis to identify the specific dynamics of ‘socio-optical construction’ — adding a concrete analysis of visual perception to the general idea of social construction — may help scholars to more effectively account for some of the ‘hard problems’ of constructionist theory, such as the body.
Baron-Cohen S. ( 2003) The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain. New York, NY: Basic Books.
2.
Bartky S. ( 1988) Foucault, femininity, and the modernization of patriarchal power. In: Diamond I and Quinby L (eds) Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 61-85.
3.
Bartlett F. ( 1932) Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4.
Bateson G. ( 1972 [1955]) A theory of play and fantasy. In: Bateson G, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York, NY: Ballantine , 177-193.
5.
Bem S. ( 1993) The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
6.
Berger PL and Luckmann T. ( 1967[1966]) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor.
7.
Bordo S. ( 1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body . Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
8.
Bordo S. ( 1999) The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private . New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
9.
Bourdieu P. ( 1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
10.
Bourdieu P. ( 1996[1992]) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
11.
Brizendine L. ( 2006) The Female Brain. New York, NY: Morgan Road Books.
12.
Broadbent D. ( 1958) Perception and Communication. London : Pergamon.
13.
Bruner J. ( 1958) Social psychology and perception. In: Macoby EM et al. (eds.) Readings in Social Psychology. New York, NY: Henry Holt, 85-94.
14.
Burnett R. ( 2004) How Images Think. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
15.
Butler J. ( 1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . New York, NY: Routledge.
16.
Butler J. ( 2004) Undoing Gender. New York, NY: Routledge.
17.
Cerulo K. ( 2002) Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition . New York, NY and London: Routledge.
18.
Chase C. ( 1998) Affronting reason. In: Atkins D (ed.) Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Communities. Binghamton, NY: The Haworth Press, 205-219.
19.
Chayko M. ( 2002) Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
20.
Child A. ( 1950) The sociology of perception. Journal of Genetic Psychology77(2): 293-303.
21.
Colapinto J. ( 2000) As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
22.
Connell RW ( 1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
23.
Connell RW ( 1995) Masculinities. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
24.
Cooley CH ( 1962[1909]) Social Organization: A Larger Study of the Mind . New York, NY: Schocken.
25.
Davis M. ( 1983) Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
26.
De Beauvoir S. ( 1975[1952]) The Second Sex. New York, NY : Knopf.
27.
DeGloma T. and Friedman A. ( 2005) Thinking with socio-mental filters: exploring the social structuring of attention and significance. Paper presented at the Session on Structures of Knowledge, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting.
28.
Douglas M. ( 1982) Introduction. In: Essays in the Sociology of Perception. New York, NY: Routledge , 11-13.
29.
Durkheim E. ( 1966[1951]) Suicide. New York, NY: The Free Press.
30.
Durkheim E. ( 1995[1912]) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York, NY: The Free Press.
31.
Eugenides J. ( 2002) Middlesex: A Novel. New York, NY: Picador.
32.
Fausto-Sterling A. ( 2000) Sexing The Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York, NY: Basic Books.
33.
Fine GA ( 1998) Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
34.
Fiske S. and Taylor S. ( 1991) Social Cognition. 2nd Edition. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
35.
Fleck L. ( 1981[1935]) Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
36.
Fox R. ( 2003) Through the lenses of biology and sociology: organ replacement . In: Williams SJ et al. (eds) Debating Biology: Sociological Reflections on Health, Medicine and Society . London and New York, NY: Routledge, 235-244.
37.
Friedman A. ( 2006) Unintended Consequences of the Feminist Sex/Gender Distinction . Genders43. Available (consulted 8 February 2011) at: http://www.genders.org/g43/g43_friedman.html
38.
Friedman A. ( 2007) Sexpectations: socially organized selective perception in sex attribution. Paper presented at the Session on the Sociology of the Body, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting .
39.
Friedman A. ( 2009) Blind to sameness: unseen similarities between male and female bodies. Paper presented at the Session on New Directions in Cognitive Sociology, Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting.
40.
Garfinkel H. ( 1967[1964]) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
41.
Gatens M. ( 1996) Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London and New York, NY: Routledge .
42.
Goffman E. ( 1961) Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction . Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill .
43.
Goffman E. ( 1963) Behavior in Public Places. New York, NY: The Free Press.
44.
Goffman E. ( 1986[1974]) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.
45.
Hale CJ ( 1998) Tracing a ghostly memory in my throat: reflections on FTM feminist voice and agency. In: Digby T (ed.) Men Doing Feminism. New York, NY and London: Routledge, 99-129.
46.
Hanson NR ( 1965) Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
47.
Howey N. ( 2002) Dress Codes of Three Girlhoods - My Mother’s, My Father’s, and Mine. New York, NY: Picador.
48.
Jay M. ( 1993) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
49.
Jones EE ( 1990) Interpersonal Perception. New York, NY: Freeman.
50.
Kessler S. ( 1998) Lessons from the Intersexed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
51.
Kessler S. and McKenna W. ( 1978) Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
52.
Kleege G. ( 1999) Sight Unseen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
53.
Knorr-Cetina KD ( 1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
54.
Kuhn T. ( 1996 [1962]) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press.
55.
Lakoff G. and Johnson M. ( 1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.
56.
Laqueur T. ( 1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
57.
Lorber J. ( 1994) Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press.
58.
Lowe D. ( 1982) History of Bourgeois Perception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
59.
Lueptow L., Garovich-Szabo L. and Lueptow M. ( 2001) Social change and the persistence of sex typing: 1974-1997 . Social Forces80(1): 1-36.
60.
Malinowski B. ( 1929) The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia . New York, NY: Halcyon House.
61.
Mannheim K. ( 1936) Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Harvest .
62.
Marx K. and Engels F. ( 1978) The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd Edition. Edited by RC Tucker.New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
63.
Mendola J. ( 2003) Contextual shape processing in human visual cortex: beginning to fill-in the blanks. In: Pessoa L and De Weerd P (eds) Filling In: From Perceptual Completion to Cortical Reorganization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 38-58.
64.
Merleau-Ponty M. ( 1962) Phenomenology of Perception. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
65.
Merleau-Ponty M. ( 1963) The Structure of Behavior. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
66.
Mills CW ( 1963) People, Power, and Politics: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills. New York, NY: Ballantine .
67.
Moi T. ( 1999) What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
68.
Mol A. ( 2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
69.
Money J. and Ehrhardt A. ( 1972) Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. Baltimore , MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
70.
Nicholson L. ( 1994) Interpreting gender. Signs20(1): 79-105.
71.
Nisbett R. and Masuda T. ( 2003) Culture and point of view. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America100(19): 11163-11175.
72.
Powers P., Andriks J. and Loftus E. ( 1979) The eyewitness accounts of males and females. Journal of Applied Psychology64(3): 339-347.
73.
Preves SE ( 2003) Intersex and Identity: The Contested Self. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
74.
Prosser J. ( 1998) Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
75.
Rhoads S. ( 2004) Taking Sex Differences Seriously. San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books.
76.
Rupp LJ and Taylor V. ( 2003) Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret. Chicago, IL and London: University of California Press.
77.
Schutz A. ( 1951) Making music together: a study in social relationship . Social Research18(1): 76-97.
78.
Schutz, A. and Luckmann, T. ( 1973) The Structures of the Life World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
79.
Shibutani T. ( 1955) Reference groups as perspectives. American Journal of Sociology60(6): 562-569.
80.
Shibutani T. ( 1962) Reference groups and social control. In: Rose A (ed.) Human Behavior and Social Processes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 128-145.
81.
Shilling C. ( 2003) The Body and Social Theory. 2nd Edition. London: Sage.
82.
Simmel G. ( 1924 [1908]) Sociology of the senses: visual interaction . In: Park R and Burgess R (eds) Introduction to the Science of Sociology. New York, NY: Greenwood Press.
83.
Simpson R. ( 2006) The forest and the trees: changing styles of focusing . In: Simpson R The Germ Culture: Metaphor, Modernity, and Epidemic Disease. Dissertation, Department of Sociology , Rutgers University, 79-95.
84.
Summers L. ( 2005) Remarks at the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce. 14 January 2005. Available (consulted 13 September 2006) at http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html
85.
Tannen D. ( 1993) Framing in Discourse. New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
86.
Taylor SE, Letitia AP and Sears DO ( 2000) Social Psychology, 10th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
87.
Turner BS ( 1992) Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. London and New York, NY: Routledge .
88.
Udry R. ( 2000) Biological limits of gender construction. American Sociological Review65(3): 443-457.
89.
Wang J., Clementz BA and Keil A. ( 2007) The neural correlates of feature-based selective attention when viewing spatially and temporally overlapping images. Neuropsychologia45(7): 1393-1399.
90.
Weber M. ( 1946) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Edited by HH Gerth and CW Mills.Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge.
91.
West C. and Zimmerman DH ( 1987) Doing gender. Gender and Society1(2): 125-151.
92.
Young IM ( 2005) On Female Bodily Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
93.
Young R. and Balaban E. ( 2006) Psychoneuroindoctrinology. Nature443(12): 634.
94.
Zerubavel E. ( 1991) The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life. New York, NY: The Free Press.
95.
Zerubavel E. ( 1997) Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
96.
Zerubavel E. ( 2003) Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
97.
Zerubavel E. ( 2006) The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
