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#14699619
Wanting some pushback on something I been thinking about.
I read someone's thoughts about what seemed like their idea that expanding categories and making them more inclusive was the best route to improving things. It got my thinking about how the social relations of our world relate to certain concepts such as race and gender.
And what I thought instead was it'd eb better in many contexts to make these categories irrelevant by making them socially significant and the route to doing this was to improve the fluidity between the categories.
And what I'm thinking isn't that a person with darker skin pigmentation makes it lighter, but instead that if in the long term one was able to improve racial equality in a country, the social significance of being black in the US would be diminished on the basis that a person of darker skin tone could ideally be perceived in the same light as a white person. I have an assumption that much that is attributed to these categories are often spacially defined.
Blacks in the US end up being defined by poverty and black becomes synonymous with poverty for people and black then becomes synonymous with implications of enduring poverty.
If you had somehow achieved a society in which there was less informal segregation through economic disparity, then the category of being black wouldn't be significance because blacks would then be in the same areas as whites. Blacks get then defined by where they're confined to, where they are seen as a majority, it becomes a space that is defined as being for blacks, this happens in the US where all the blacks have been segregated to the other side of a river of a city or a poorer side of town sort of thing.
A similar thing happens especially for women, man becomes defined by where men are expected to prevail.
For an example http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jackson/future.of.gender/Readings/DownSoLong--WhyIsItSoHard.pdf p. 9
Consider another example showing how beliefs about sex differences cloud people's analytical vision. How often have we heard question like: will women who enter high-status jobs or political positions end up looking like men or will the result of their entry be a change in the way business and politics is conducted? Implicit in this question are a set of strong assumptions: men have essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations that have shaped the terrain of high status jobs and women have different essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations. The conclusion is that and women's entry into these positions unleashes a conflict between their feminine essence and the dominant masculine essence that has shaped the positions. Either the positions must change to adapt to women's distinctive characteristics or the women must become masculine. (It is perhaps telling that those who raise this issue usually seem concerned only with women entering high-status positions; it is unclear if women becoming factory workers are believed immune or unimportant.) The analytical flaw here i assuming that masculinity has shaped the character of jobs rather than that jobs have shaped masculinity. In her well-known book Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Kanter argued persuasively that the personality characteristics associated with male and female corporate employees really reflected the contours of their positions. The implication is simple and straightforward. Women who enter high-status positions will look about the same as men in those positions not because they are becoming masculine, but because they're adapting to the demands and opportunities of the position, just like men.


So i'm thinking the idea of a gender difference i diminished once it in the real world is diminished. Of course people can counter to the real world prevail in their beliefs and make subcategorizations of someone being an exception to a rule and so forth. But if prevalent enough, if it became say normative for both men and women to work and do housework, the idea of housework being a woman's gender role would be made socially insignificant. Similarly I'm assuming this would apply to other contexts when the exclusively of space and behaviours is intermingled between demographics and exclusivity between groups in important aspects is diminished.

And when it comes to the expansion of categories I get the feeling there's a trend of reactionaries setting up assumptions and categories that have problematic and debatable assumptions implicit in them and moderate progressive fail to launch a counter attack because they merely try to adapt the concept but leave the inherent assumptions unscathed.
I've seen in when it comes to multiculturalism: http://www.drustvo-antropologov.si/AN/PDF/2012_3/Anthropological_Notebooks_XVIII_3_Fontefrancesco.pdf
This vision of culture clearly opposes the concept of culture that underpinned the idea of multiculturalism that had been created and spread since the 1980s. In fact, multiculturalism became a fundamental concept in the public and political debate in that decade, as it was a response to the introduction of the concept of “culture” imposed by the “new right” of Thatcher and Regan. Since the end of the 1970s, in the same years when it was proclaimed that ‘such a thing as society [did] not exist,’ culture became the fundamental ideological hinge of the immigration policy both in the UK and the US, and more broadly of their entire political discourse. In that context, it was affirmed that to become an “American” or a “British” person, one had to be an American or a British. In other words, an individual had to embody a particular set of intangible social and behavioural characters defined as culture. If we consider what we said about anthropology, this idea of culture appears to be the direct descendant of Taylor’s: it was not acknowledging the fluidity of knowledge; instead, even worse, it was affirming a principle of superiority of a particular culture over all the other forms of knowledge and lifestyles (Wright 1998).

Here basically the modern conception of culture isn't in the debate,t eh very assumptions that inform the idea of multiculturalism come from a conception of culture where culture was seen as static, hell for some through Spencerian sense even inheritable.
I've seen it with the use of the right's campaign of being against political correctness as a means to distort the public sense of the word victim and present themselves as victims and delegitimize the validity of people being victims.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.454.3637&rep=rep1&type=pdf
The left's response? To stop using the word victim and instead use the word survivor, leaving the tactics of the right intact and unchallenged.
These aren't examples of conceptual expansion but are of the rights success in dominating the discourse and setting the terms. The examples in which some progressives seem to want to expand is dichotomies of sexuality and gender which I don't get the feeling from many that they challenge the concepts which have dubious origins and assumptions to their foundations that I'm skeptical to how much they can be conceptually transformed and wonder whether to diminish these concepts and approach better ones similarly would require a radical change in the social relations of society.

Do you think the assumptions I make here are hitting somewhere in how the real world informs the concepts or do you have a better interpretation of how the social relations in the material world inform our abstract concepts?
And do you think it's the reasonable route is to diminish social signifcance of categories as informed by the real world rather than playing an abstract game of making a concept braoder or more inclusive in definition?



Beyond all this verbosity, I suppose what I wonder about is the base and superstructure sentiments and the validity people believe they have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure
I have a sort of leaning that we are free to act on the world and change it but only if one changes the material world and how relate to it, only then do abstract ideas radically change and gain traction.
Challenging the abstract should be a minor step to getting into positions of changing social relations and conditions that maintain ones one doesn't desire as I get the sense that the 'base' does more to inform the 'superstructure' than the 'superstructure' does the base.

Ramblings over.
#15155121
I think I found a sort of general answer and it was kind of present in my thoughts in the OP more clearly delineates the course.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/social.pdf
Deconstruction

Let’s make a metaphor with the issue of women living in a location in the division of labour as unpaid child-carers; think of “women’s work” as a neighbourhood, and women as people living there, some by choice, some against their will. What options are available to women in this space?
One option is increased child benefits for stay-at-home mothers, thus making life better in the ghetto, a measure welcomed and immediately benefiting people stuck there. It also has the effect of marginally enhancing the status of child-carers, but it is hardly likely to enhance the attractiveness of being a stay-at-home parent sufficiently to encourage men to give up their paid work and become househusbands. It actually emphasises a woman’s role as unpaid child-carer, trapping her in that role, since it is a disincentive to going out to get paid work, stigmatises the mother as a welfare recipient and relieves the male of responsibility for contributing to the upbringing of his own children. This is the kind of affirmative strategy which has immediate appeal but fails to solve the problem, and correspond to all those kinds of public policy strategies that are based around providing services to “areas of special need.” Good and necessary up to a point, but unable to resolve the underlying problems.

Another strategy is to commercialise child-care, thus moving the job into the market and giving women the choice of doing the same work for a wage, or doing a different job while their own kids are cared for in a childcare centre. This is probably more effective in giving women a choice, but it runs into a couple of problems. So long as child-care is stigmatised as “women’s work,” then it remains low-paid and women move out of their homes into low- paid jobs doing “women’s work.” There is no way out of this trap until the gender division of labour is broken down. Once women are recognised capable of the same kind of work as men, then women can command wages equal to their male partners and make working for a wage worth putting the kids into child-care. Meanwhile, with child-care no longer stigmatised as “women’s work” she is more likely to be left a fair share of domestic duties and child-care centres are treated as seriously as other service. In other words, the “location” — “women’s work” — has to be deconstructed altogether, and “woman” no longer a socially constructed location.
What this corresponds to in the geographical analogue, is that the boundaries of the neighbourhood have to be broken down. That is to say any kind of person might want to live there, and living there is always a matter of choice. The neighbourhood is dissociated from the kind of people who live there.
However, childrearing is an important social function. It ought not to be an occupation which is denigrated and no-one should be forced to go into the professional by reason of their gender, but whoever is there needs to do the job well. If women choose not to be child- raisers, then that has to be a matter of choice, not because they have to go out to work and “can’t afford children.” If we want the next generation to be raised well, then social arrangements have to be made to make it a worthwhile profession.
Likewise, dealing with the social problems in a poor area is a vital social task for the whole country. Some people live in a neighbourhood only because they can’t afford to live anywhere else. If improvements force people to move out, then everyone has a problem. Someone has to take on the role of custodians of the neighbourhood, and it has to be made a worthwhile and honourable profession worth sticking around for.
Now, just as I would question that commercialisation of child-care can ever provide the full range of things that children need, I also question whether paid social workers and security guards can provide everything that a neighbourhood needs. Like kids, streets need love, even if from amateurs. And it’s everyone’s problem.
Making “women’s work” everyone’s responsibility, means getting men to take on that work and that generally means a fight for those stuck with “women’s work” not so much to change themselves or get better recognition for what they do (these too) but to get other people to accept their responsibility.
Society at large is free-riding on the backs of people living in “poor neighbourhoods” who are bearing the brunt’s of society’s problems, problems arising from inequality, from social change, from immigration and even just raising the next generation of workers. A big part of what these people need to do is to spread the pain and get the wider community to start picking up their share of responsibility for these problems.

This outlines the issue with identity politics and why it's essentially a liberal response rather than a radical one.
https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/02/07/a-marxist-feminist-critique-of-intersectionality-theory/
For several pages, Fanon argues that black people must embrace blackness, and struggle on the basis of being black, in order to negate white supremacists social relations. But to stop there reproduces our one-sided existence and the forms of appearance of capitalism. Identity politics argues, “I am a black man,” or “I am a woman,” without filling out the other side of the contradiction “…and I am a human.” If the starting and ending point is one-sided, there is no possibility for abolishing racialized and gendered social relations. For supporters of identity politics (despite claiming otherwise), womanhood, a form of appearance within society, is reduced to a natural, static “identity.” Social relations such as “womanhood,” or simply gender, become static objects, or “institutions.” Society is therefore organized into individuals, or sociological groups with natural characteristics. Therefore, the only possibility for struggle under identity politics is based on equal distribution or individualism (I will discuss this further below). This is a bourgeois ideology in that it replicates the alienated individual invented and defended by bourgeois theorists and scientists (and materially enforced) since capitalism’s birth.

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