NOTES ON CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORIES

DU BOIS AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

o W.E.B Du Bois and the idea of “double consciousness”

o Du Bois explored how racial status is linked to social oppression and power
o Double-consciousness also reflects Cooley’s idea of the “looking glass self”

CONTEMPORARY THEORY

o Themes: ideology, power, and identity

o Key question for Western Marxism: Why did the revolution, as Marx predicted, never
happen? What happened to class conflict?

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

o Hegemony is political domination through ideological control and consent | the consent
sought by those in power is active consent.
o Hegemony operates when those who are subject to power also identify with that power.
o Hegemony is a process that is constantly negotiated and renegotiated.
o Key point is that hegemony is never total/ strategies of resistance
o Hegemony essentially refers to ideological control and consent:
o There is also a need to consider how hegemony is established and how it is undermined/
resisted.
o Hegemony also as a form of cultural dominance – the view that individuals are dumbed
down and depoliticized through culture/ entertainment
o We have become consumers rather than citizens - manipulated into accepting that there is
only one reality

Dorothy Smith and standpoint theory

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o Feminism: a collection of ideologies that assert that women and men should be social,
economic, and political equals
o Three different waves of feminism
o Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women should have equal rights in economic and
political life/ Quote: “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational
creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were
in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone”
o Challenge to androcentric view – dominance of the perspective of men
o Smith’s notion of ideology: borrows from Marx that the ruling ideas are those of the
ruling class – her idea of the “ruling relations”
o Standpoint theory: knowledge begins in experience (reminiscent of John Locke)
o Note how language is gendered i.e. (wo)man/ Hu(wo)manity /examples?
o Key point is that the male standpoint is seen as objective, universal, and dominates/
androcentric view that men are seen as “objective” whereas women are “subjective”
o The result of these dominant social relations is exclusion and a silencing of women, and
the invisibility of women’s contribution to various fields.
o bell hooks - critiques feminists for their lack of attention to race
o Therefore standpoint theory has to be modified to include race as well as sex

Michel Foucault and post-structuralism:

o Context of 1968 – tumultuous climate of social protest and social change. For example…
o Foucault suggests a multi-dimensional model of power i.e. power is everywhere (like a
circuit board with no one central point)
o Discourse: a system of meaning that governs how we think, act and speak, and which
impacts upon how we act and behave.
o Example of discourses of health i.e. there is a dominant discourse of nutrition and diet,
but one which also influences how people act and behave in terms of establishing norms
of body shape and image (Foucault calls this a process of “normalization”)
o Discourse operates as a type of power that encourages some behavior while discouraging
others/ encourages conformity/ standardization.

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o According to Foucault, there are certain forms of acceptable discourse in a given society,
whereas others are rendered marginal
o Discipline: The means by which we become motivated to produce certain realities.

Queer theory: Themes of desire, language, and identity

o Queer theory is a set of ideas based around the idea that identities are not fixed and do not
determine who we are. It suggests that it is meaningless to talk in general about “women”
or any other group, as identities consist of so many elements that to assume that people
can be seen collectively on the basis of one shared characteristic is wrong. It proposes
that we deliberately challenge all notions of fixed identity, in varied and non-predictable
ways.
o Queer theory argues that one is never fully “male” or “female” identity (combination of
sex and gender) but rather somewhere in between/ therefore gender is a performance
o Queer theorists see the “self” as a performed self: that is, we do not possess a fixed,
determinate identity, but rather one that is fluid and malleable and subject to being
radically changed.
o Queer theory criticizes how binaries are structured around man-woman/ straight-gay etc/
therefore it is a rejection of either/or binaries in favour of fluidity