Seriality (gender studies)
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Seriality or serial collectivity is a term that
Group vs series
A group, in
Seriality, in contrast to the active effort of group being, describes a level of social existence that is habitually constrained and directed by existing circumstances and material conditions. In a series, a collection of people are unified passively by objects, routines, practices, and habits around which their actions are oriented. For instance, people waiting in line for a bus, radio listeners, prison inmates and street theatre spectators are all examples of series. In each example, individuals are oriented toward the same goals by their response to existing conditions and structures in the environment, which are the collective legacy of human actions and decisions in the past. To illustrate concretely, the actions of people who stop and watch a street theatre performance may be shaped by existing conditions which constrain and permit their actions, such as the social acceptability of staging a performance on the street, the attractive costumes of the performers, high unemployment rates among actors, the existence of a public square, social expectations of their roles as spectators. Members of a series are anonymous and isolated, although not alone; often individuals in a series take into account the expected behavior of other members when pursuing their own actions—for instance, a bus rider may choose to avoid rush hour traffic. Members of a series are also interchangeable, although not identical, in relation to the objects that effect their serialized condition: From the point of view of a radio program broadcaster, one listener is interchangeable with another.
Groups and series are related in that groups arise out of a backdrop of seriality, and disperse to fall back into serialized conditions. In other words, groups are the product of individuals′ response to shared conditions; Young gives the example of commuters at a bus stop who, when the bus fails to appear, organize themselves into a group to hail taxis, complain to the bus company, etc.
Seriality as a solution to a conceptual dilemma in feminism
Young's reconceptualization of women as a series is an attempt to provide a solution to the problems in
i) On one hand, it is important to be able to speak of
ii) On the other hand, the category of woman is fraught with problems of essentialization,
Thinking of woman as a series solves these conceptual problems. It allows one to meaningfully use the category while avoiding the mistake of falsely
Other potential applications of seriality
See also
- Woman
- Gender
- Social constructionism
- Feminism
- Feminist theory
- Third-wave feminism
- Gender studies
- Women's studies
References
- ^ S2CID 144677439.