Second, note that among the causal effects of speech acts are both psychological and sociological effects. Consider an array of dismissive, belittling, or marginalizing speech acts. These will have some sort of effect on the psychology of the target of the act. He may accept the diminished status, feel humiliated and ostracized or, on the other hand, react with defiance. (And these, in turn, will play a role in determining what social status is invoked.) Similarly, others in the social audience may give the intended uptake and accept that this person is now a social pariah or, on the other hand, reject the belittling speech act and stand in solidarity with the target.
The interactions of these dimensions of social
role construction are complex. To illustrate I offer an autobiographical
example. In High School I was skinny (5'11.5" 130 lbs, 30"
waist), weak, awkward - in both the physical and social senses - and a smart kid
who reflexively participated in class discussion (aka, loser). As a result, though I enjoyed
sports with my friends, there were a wide variety of ways in which I was
socially marked as a non-jock, and more specifically a "loser geek
non-jock". There were official speech-acts - coaches cutting me the one time I
tried out for a school sports team; semi-official - getting picked last in
playground and gym team competitions; and all sorts of ad hoc dismissive speech
acts - Lance is such a ____ (fill in all sorts of derogatory terms). Such performances interpellate one into quite a few roles at once and
this was all tied up with gender and sexuality. If the basketball
game is starting and someone says "Go away you fag!" this had as much to do
with gender - not a proper man - and sports - not
athletic enough to play with - as with sexuality,
though at the same time, of course, it reinforced heteronormativity.
In my case, there was pretty consistent uptake
of such judgments by the other kids at school. And my own inability to be
particularly good at sports – here we see defeasible material inferential
connections between non-social factors and social statuses- contributed to my
own psychological acceptance of the invocative function of these speech acts. (Even if I had
been a budding Olympian, universal exclusion of this sort might have given me
the social status of geeky non-jock, but the interpellation would have been harder.)
At first, I saw this – following the cues of US
High School - as a shameful identity. I was excluded from the society one
"should" aim to be a part of, I was not a proper man, etc. Later, and
gradually, I came to embrace my geeky non-jock identity as a matter of pride.
This first came with some significant intellectual recognition in late HS along
with success in music – and despite the limited importance of these accomplishments to peers, they became things I was proud of. And that pride grew in
college and grad school. By that point, my non-jock intellectual identity was
well and truly a part of my psychology, which only reinforced social
expectations and understandings of who I was. I was simply not a jock. I
was an academic, activist geek who sometimes liked to do sports - cycling and
basketball mostly - but was
not good at or, more importantly, serious abut them. Again, this judgment was more than a description. It
was a characterization of how I saw myself, the ways that I measured success
and self-worth, a stance on what others ought to care about and facilitate in
my life, etc. Athletics provided no measures
that mattered.
Even during my post-doc years, after meeting the
person I was to marry - herself very much a female jock, but one growing up in
pre-Title IX America, and so an interesting counterpoint to this narrative -
and after she got me training to do a number of triathlons,
my image of myself as non-jock was untouched. I worked out a lot in those
years, but it was for fun, to stay healthy, to have a way to spend time with
Amy – none of which changed my core self-understanding. Academics might label
me a jock, but I always laughed and rejected these uninformed - so I took it - local invocatives.
It is important at this stage that I had no community of other athletes, no
group of friends who I regularly spent time with who also participated in
sports. Amy and I worked out, and then lived with academics and activists. So whereas in HS the
psychological identification had been brought about by the social
interpellation, here, my uptake of counter-invocatives was blocked by a clear
and long-standing psychological self-understanding.
Fast forward to the last 2 years. At Amy's
urging, I have taken up rowing fairly seriously. After a year learning the
basics and getting into a semblance of shape, since this April, I've been
averaging 4 days a week with a very serious club, rowing with a demanding coach
from 5-7 am. I'm certainly more fit than I've been in ages. After many years of
sporadic cross-training, and these last two years of intense rowing and related
work, I'm 5' 10.5" (age shortens us), 158lbs, and again a 30" waist.
So basically 25 lbs more muscle and much better CV fitness. I've also gotten
fairly skilled at the technical aspects. (I say this, in addition to bragging,
because these sorts of biological facts also have a role to play in constituting
all the social normative facts I’ve been discussing.) But I'm still pretty
close to the bottom of the club members in both strength and fitness, last
among the men and only ahead of a couple of the women. (Though on the technical
aspects I am near the middle.)
But here's the big difference: rowing, at least
at our club, is very much a social activity. Not only is it a team sport, but
we have happy hours together, we have club barbecues, we socialize and bond
over shared lifestyle oddities like going to bed at 9pm and eating 4-5 meals a
day. Folks at the club have become friends, and they are thoroughly accepting,
regularly issuing a wide range of speech acts then invoke a status of
"rower," which is surely a species of jock. As Amy said the other day
"dude, you get up at 4 am to row for 2 hours 5 days a week; you compete;
you are getting better at a prodigious rate. How the hell aren't you a
jock?" For a while, such claims just seemed bizarre, as if
someone suddenly came up and said that I was really an engineer, or a woman, or
a Frenchman. My reaction was "No. I do this, but I'm not a jock. Amy is the jock. I'm
just the activist geek who tags along to jock things."
There are crucial psychological and social
differences between the two. To assert an identity is to assert a structure of
reasons. I sometimes play online blitz chess and enjoy it, but this gives me no
particular reason to make time to play chess in the future. Similarly, it is
not something that others have any particular reason to accommodate. The fact that I could play chess from 3-5 on
Friday is virtually no reason at all – no more than any other option that would
make anyone happy – to excuse me from a department meeting. By contrast, the fact that I need time to
finish a major philosophy paper is reason to reschedule family matters. That
such accommodations are called for is part of what is endorsed in judging
something part of an identity. [Alessandra Tanesini and I discussed these issues a long time ago in“Identity
Judgments, Queer Politics,” Radical
Philosophy 100,
March/April 2000. Reprinted in Queer Theory (Readers in Cultural Criticism Series), ed
Morland, Willox, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004.]
My resistence is slipping. I am now the subject of a range of not-easily-dismissible
invocatives as a jock. I retain strong vestiges of an earlier psychological
embrace of an identity – first shameful, later proud – as non-jock. Empirical
features that put pressure on the possibility of embracing a jock identity are changing. Will I come to accept a
jock-activist-academic identity, and will this form a stable mutually reinforcing system with social uptake? How will the uptake of those three identities work across relevant subcommunities? Note also that age is an important factor.
There is a growing phenomenon of, as a friend going through similar changes put
it, “late onset athleticism”. Rarely in
earlier generations did someone engage in more athletic activity later in life,
but recently this has become “a thing”. There
was a recent story in the Pittsburgh newspaper about a grandfather who got into
rowing from watching his grandchildren.
No nice conclusions here: just that humans are a work in progress, and social interpellation is complicated.
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