Blog 6: Proposal Blog

Dustin Ginsburg

            The othered community that I will likely write about for our upcoming project is the Muslim community. I think that it will be very interesting to research and discover the ways in which the Muslim faith has been affected by current world events. Conflicts and wars in the Arab world, terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and terrorist attacks in America and Europe have created an image around Islam depicting violence, ignorance, and hatred. As a result, the Islamic religion has been marginalized as a whole in Western society, creating a stereotypical and stigmatized view of their religion.

            My initial ideas for how I will go about research for this project is first to provide introductory information that will provide context and bring the reader up-to-date about issues that add to the marginalization of Islam. News reports, interviews, and informational videos will all probably provide enough information to get my initial point across. After that introduction, I will likely find statistics supporting the view that the overwhelming majority of Muslim’s have rational, peaceful ideas in regards to their own religion. After that segway, I will provide texts by members of the Muslim faith in addition to other supporting texts, that further detail how Islam has been marginalized, how the community has been affected, and what has been done by the community to distance themselves from ‘problem’ members of the community. I think that this project has the potential to be an eye-opening study into how Muslims are currently being perceived in Western society and how world events have shaped that image. At the end of this project, the ways in which our cultural ideas of “normal” are constructed and reinforced in regards to Islam will be discussed, analyzed, and theorized.

Blog 5: Hanfler, TED Talk/Radio Lab, Lorber, and Young

Dustin Ginsburg


Social construction is how members from a community group certain people into groups that are then portrayed in some overarching context as a whole. The impact that social construction has on people can become positive or negative for certain members or a group that do not fit the constructed image. For example, in the article by Judith Lorber, she delves into the social construction of gender and how the typical grouping of people into male and female does not fit for everybody. As a result, labels such as transsexual, berdaches, and manly-hearted women, have popped up in various cultures to describe people who do not fit the typical grouping of male and female. Lorber describes to great lengths how the idea of gender being only male and female has been instilled to people from birth, going so far as to say, “ gender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes.” This is an important point to be made about social construction.

Before these readings, I had never considered how much our society has affected the social construction of gender. Growing up, I was only aware of gender being male and female, unaware that people existed that did not fit those traditional categories. As I grew older and became aware of other gender groups, they were often spoken of in a stigmatized and negative view, as if being a gender outside the norm was socially unacceptable. Since this is how I was exposed to this issue of gender, I could have easily just went along with believing the negative stereotypes associated with the transgendered group of gender. Social construction of gender, and many other topics, has been so ingrained into society that we can forget there may be other viewpoints or groupings of people that are not addressed with traditional groupings. In addition, stereotypes are created and carried on throughout generations because of the socially constructed views that are passed on over the years.

In the Vershawn Ashanti Young article, he explained that the strict education writing guidelines supported by school systems around the country is outdated and basically is prejudicial to groups of people. He explains how people’s backgrounds in language and culture are different from one another, and that people should not be forced into writing with a style that may be foreign to them. In his article, Young wrote, “you can’t mix no dialects at work; how would peeps who ain’t from yo hood understand you?”, and then stated that people with jobs in the corporate world don’t follow any standard English. The point he is making is that our society has developed a “standard” way of writing that has become the only acceptable form. However, many people speaking in different dialects may have more difficulties writing in such a style. The way in which we have socially constructed our views of appropriate forms of writing has therefore negatively affected people despite such standards likely being made out of the best intentions. I think that theses standards though are acceptable even if they are potentially discriminatory or biased against particular groups of people. By creating a standard of writing as the norm, it creates an easy to understand formula for how to write. Instead of having to read very carefully certain dialects, people are able to glide through texts much easier as a result of this form of social construction.