Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Calvin

Week 3

e-Corpus #2

         When Scot came in I liked that he brought up the idea of whether the ever expanding amount of labels are good or bad, do they help us understand better or do they just make it more muddled.  Fore some time now I have been pondering the same question.  I tend to think that they only help to separate people out farther, rather than bring them together in an atmosphere of shared understanding.  This is true for gender, race, religion, and all sorts of other ways we categories each other.  See by crating categories people start to only see each other only in terms of same or different.  When categorized people (and of course when I say people I’m referring to people in general, of course, as in all things there are exceptions) only look at whether others are in their category or the category of other.  What then happens is what always happens when people experience what is different from them selves.  They get insecure and frightened, which offend leads to hatred and violence.  That is why instead of creating categories we should just look at each other as people, and do like Scot suggested and hear each other’s stories.  For it is a person’s story that makes them who they are, not a label that is correctly or incorrectly applied, but to engage in dialogue with them.  Of course that doesn’t mean we will all love each other, but this way we wont pre-judge based on a category but look at every one on an individual and personal level.  So lets stop crating more and more categories and actually communicate.