Growing up in a Jewish household has been one of the defining aspects of my identity. This is not a religious statement, rather it is a cultural and familial one. While Judaism is a strong, ancient religion genetically and ethnically tying together a group of people across disparate parts of the world through a well established belief system, this is not the aspect of my identity I am focusing on with regard to Judaism. Dorothy Smith talks of everyday world experiences, such as walking your dog and avoiding walking on manicured property areas, as defining how people co-ordinate their world and make sense of it through the constraints of institutions. Taking this a step further, if institutions are understood as the rules by which people live in society, than religions can be understood as the different sets of culturally specific rules through which families come together in identity construction- that is- during times of transition requiring a common set of social definitions of what it means to be family.

To demonstrate this from my own childhood with an example, every Saturday (or Sabbath, known as the holy day of rest according to Jewish tradition) my family would walk together to the Synagogue for spiritual services (or Shul as it is often referred to). Time at Shul is probably not all that different from what you’d experience at a Church on a Sunday. It is generally a source of community-building, but on top of that, reflection on the past week through scripture, a reminder of the religious hierarchy that must prevail in the institutions, as well as the commonly permissive ways we celebrate all events within a community throughout the life course, such as births, deaths, coming of age events, and the like. I attribute my dual identity in a similar vein as DuBois’ concept of double consciousness to my personal atheistic beliefs in combination with my strong ties to my family as well as my Jewish cultural identity. Further adding to this sense of double consciousness are strong historical and cultural memories that tie my Jewish “blood” to my identity, most notably the Holocaust and the ways in which Jews have for many centuries stood up to varying forms and degrees of antisemitism and persecution.

DuBois defines Double Consciousness through a different identity lenses. For him, it is through problematizing of his African-American identity that he arrives at the concept. This is because during the time that he was writing, still under the oppression of Jim Crowe laws in the United States and having a mixed black and white background, he felt he could “pass” for either identity in many contexts, but it was difficult for him to achieve comfort in his own way because he always felt one “half” of himself in flux in many situations. DuBois was one of the very first non white people to pass through the education system in the United States at the time, and it is no wonder he felt a strong sense of internal strife during this period of change in the American conception of race and oppression at this period.

Relating this back to my own experience as a Jewish student at UBC, I attended an event at the Hillel House several weeks ago. Hillel is a centre for Jewish life on campus. I have been to some of their events before, especially in my first and second years of schooling at UBC because it was one of the first areas of campus I decided to look into because of my identity. The first few years of my time at UBC were a marked period of transition for me, however, as I was in the midst of forming strong opinions about my identity, such as my atheist views, feminist identification, coming out as gay to my family and friends, and more politically leftist leaning lenses of the world after being exposed to more of the world than I had ever been before. These changes, or developments in my identity for that matter have had a profoundly conflicting and tension-inducing effect on my relations with my Jewish “half”. I hadn’t been back to Hillel House for probably 2 to 3 years when I decided to attend this event several weeks ago because I needed the space, time, and energy to reflect on my relationship with my Jewish identity.

I haven’t solved these tensions by any stretch, however I have been able to gain some perspective. One such insight, for example, is that somehow in political and academic attitudes and discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is somehow the case that if you support one side (Israel) you must necessarily be a politically right-leaning oriented individual, and on the other hand if you support the other side (Palestine), you must necessarily be a politically left-leaning oriented individual. There is very little space to exist on the political and cultural spectrum outside of this binary. This is exemplified by a relatively recent, sad moment in Canadian political history when the then-president of the Green Party of Canada was essentially forced to resign over a letter he wrote in support of a nuanced view toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this summer, amid continued warfare between the two sides. This demonstrated a refusal on the part of the party to consider allowing the party position to not take a specific position on the issue in support of one side or the other. This was a heavy moment for me, as a generally progressive politically inclined individual, believing that the Green Party is rightly making strides in the right direction toward environmental sustainability and responsibility in Canada. It meant that politically, if you are progressive (or left-oriented) and are not against supporting Israel, there’s no representation for you in Canada, and in most other democracies in the world for that matter.

This article is not about Israel, because my views on Israel are extremely complex and personal for that matter. However, in relation to identity construction, I am attempting to draw a parallel between my dual identity as a Jewish student at UBC in the 2010s and Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness. This is a product of attending many events, such as the one at Hillel I attended a few weeks ago, where my relative support for Israel (not Israel’s policies) has been perceived as support for exclusionary-based, ideologically right-wing or Islamophobic attitudes. In the opposite direction, my feminist and anti-oppressive attitudes have also been perceived as those that are necessary for a view toward Israel that is nothing less than a branding of the Jewish state as a menace, a demonic, colonizing, patriarchal force that must be boycotted, removed, and sanctioned in the international community.

Sadly, such attitudes on both sides of the situation seem to be polarizing, especially when facing the strong, anonymously protected opinions of the citizens of the internet. Not only are those attitudes riddled with hate speech at times toward the side they are “against”, they also overwhelmingly show misunderstanding toward a host of other cultures, ideological political attitudes (such as feminism, Islam, and Judaism for examples), and people. Never has a time been so appropriate from my perspectives to take Dorothy Smith’s words to heart, that the everyday must be where we start, based on what we see on the ground. So much has been distorted by the media and  by culturally hegemonic scripts. Safe spaces for people of varying perspectives (but which in reality, most of the time, are much closer in ideological space than apart) to discuss their dual identities, as is so much more common now than in the past, are a necessity for achieving tomorrow’s peace and unifying our deepest internal tensions and identities.

*Citations: W.E.B. Du Bois (1903/2012) From “The Souls of Black Folk.” In Scott Appelrouth and Laura Desfor Edles. Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory (2^nd edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Pine Forge Press. Pp. 271-283.

Smith, Dorothy (1987/2012). From “The Everyday World As Problematic.” In Scott Appelrouth and Laura Desfor Edles. Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory (2nd Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Pine Forge Press Pp. 570-3.

During the 1960s North American society was entering a sexual, medical, and cultural renaissance that came to be defined in later periods as “the swinging sixties” or simply “the sixties”. This is because of a major collapse of social mores (more, pronounced MOOR-AY, is a sociological term meaning strict rule, such as a traffic light that is red. If you’re driving your car and don’t stop, you could face serious sanctioning, such as a traffic ticket).

Such social mores in North America I am referring to include the regulation of women’s (and men’s for that matter) sexual lives, identities, and the socially acceptable ways they were able to express themselves. This was the era of the birth of music festivals, marijuana smoking, LSD, and a growing ideological intergenerational gap characterized by varying conceptions of what words like “freedom” and “free time” and “future” meant. Eventually, during the later years of the decade, even the most radical themes of this cultural shift persisted in every corner of American society in some form, whether it be design and colour palettes for houses and room decor, popular television and media, or music itself. Take a look at this Youtube clip from the show Mad Men, where Don’s new wife sings him a song at a party to get a better understanding of what I mean.

How did you feel watching this clip? How can we understand expression of this kind from an identity construction framework?

Recently, I attended a Chinese Varsity Club event. It was one of their recruiting events, involving a lot of games and competitions and stuff of that sort. It took me back to the days of summer camp sometimes, because it felt like there were lots of friendly, outgoing people in leadership roles with high energy, wanting to make everyone feel excited and included. I have heard accusations about this club, saying that they are not inclusive toward people of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds, however this was not my experience at this event. There must have been about 200 people participating in the event in some form, because we were in one of those huge theatres on campus. I arrived late, while others were completing a scavenger hunt of some kind. We were put into groups of about 15 people with an executive team leader assigned to us, and were supposed to cheer with all the other groups. There must have been about 15-20 groups of people by the time everyone came back. Most of the cheers were pretty innocent and cute, but some were rather sexualized and the word “erotic” seems like the best word to describe them. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, I am not pointing this out as a moral issue of some kind. I cannot stress enough that I saw nothing but inclusivity and friendliness from executives and participants at this event. In fact, many leaders told us we should interview for executive positions when we were leaving the event.

In trying to understand these vivid sexual expressions exhibited by mostly men in this case, of Asian heritage from a very superficial measurement (their appearance), I believe there is something to be said about a cultural factor. If you ask my parents what they were doing in the 1960s or 70s after school, they might mention (as they once did to me) the sheer volume of alcohol consumed at parties (“enough to fill a swimming pool, I’m sure”). If you ask someone who’s parents are from Mainland China what they were doing after school in the 1960s period under Mao, it would probably sound a little bit different to say the least. I am not an expert in Chinese history, nor am I an expert in history of any kind for that matter, however, I don’t think you need a PHD in cultural studies to know that the sexual, liberal renaissance that erupted in North American culture in the 1960s was certainly not something experienced in China at the same time.

Different cultural memories can help to explain different expressions of different cultural contexts. In attempting to understand what I observed, I am hypothesizing that this difference in cultural history plays a key role. Writing in 1961, just as North American society was entering the period I described above, Erving Goffman published his seminal work on Asylums as institutions and how they socialize, erase, maintain, and create new identities. In it, he talks of something he calls “secondary adjustments”, which basically refers to the coping mechanisms individuals were observed or theorized to use to adjust to their new home in an institution. While Political Scientists tend to understand institutions as the presence of formalized rules determining how decisions are arrived at and negotiated, Sociologists tend to understand institutions as the actors or organizations and processes which empower those actors to formalize those decisions. UBC, under this perspective, is a kind of institution because it has formalized procedures for determining the rules (which students can negotiate) shaping how and when students are able to attain their university degrees.

Such rules, to varying degrees for students depending on their social location, are constraining. According to Goffman, “one of these types of secondary adjustment is ‘removal activities’, namely, undertakings that provide something for the individual to lose himself in… in much the same way that college students are able to survive their studies by looking forward to the new dates that may be found in their extracurricular activities.” It doesn’t have to be so deep or complicated, in the sense that I think this was a form of expression that is simply not available to students within the day-to-day reality of our lives as students at UBC. If you were to take off your shirt and pants and twerk it on the steps of Buchanan, you might be reported for indecent exposure to the university. It is also a form of power, considering that everyone doing the dirty moves at the event was, in the most loose and popular understanding of the term, good looking, relatively well defined and fit. This is an opportunity to gain some human agency within the comfort of a group of people of the same generational ideological or cultural context, in a college setting. I also agree with Goffman when he explains that identity is constructed negatively- that is you see what other people talk about and identify as, and this helps you to understand who you are by your negative reactions toward things that do not correlate to your identity. Since sociological perspectives on group behaviour say that there is a significant connection between the symbols we are surrounded with and the meanings we attach to behaviours, I believe that human sexuality is one of the most fascinating ways we can explore identity. I think that these raunchy movements, cheers, and if you take it a step further- attitudes exhibited at the event were also a product of group behaviour in negatively defining and redefining identity. That is, a social permission to “act out” or in ways that would transgress stark mores or even moral lines in their home life and day-to-day life. These expressive acts are in some ways validating, in others an outlet, but in many ways “safe” as well because while they are not socially permissible in most day-to-day public settings, they are still following strict masculine and feminine norms and demarcations of gender-based behaviour.

There are many Sociology and other disciplines-based approaches to the topic of gender. One of these is West and Zimmerman’s groundwork for describing femininity and masculine performance in the everyday . We know the common tropes- “active masculinity” and “passive femininity”, well in accordance with what I saw at the event. However, it wasn’t a seemingly conscious or power-driven behaviour. These sexually-frosted communications, body movements, dances, and cheers sugar coated just about every element of the event. This was performance at its best, and West and Zimmerman do a great job of showing how these displays are very much informed by popular culture. According to them, “popular culture abounds with books and magazines that compile idealized depictions of relations between men and women” (135). They continue, “however, the use of any such source as a manual of procedure requires the assumption that doing gender merely involves use of discrete, well-defined bundles of behaviour that can simply be plugged into interactional situations to produce recognizable enactments of femininity and masculinity” (135). As West and Zimmerman argue, popularly mediated conceptions of masculinity and femininity are not all created equal. They are perceived differently based on social location, I believe, and therefore you will see inherently different reactions, responses, and perhaps even performances according to cultural differences. In the case of my experiences at a Chinese Varsity Club event, these incredibly active male performances were explained by an institutional and socially mediated space on campus, a place in the life course understood to be as a socially mandated area of life transition, especially in the North American setting. The cultural memories of those from North American backgrounds will be quick to connect the historical period of the 1960s to sexual expression and experimentation on campus. I argue that this was an element explaining a more liberal regard to “socially lubricating” an event with sexualized expressions.

* Citation for West and Zimmerman: West, Candace and Don Zimmerman (1987). “Doing Gender” in Gender and Society 1(2): pp 125-51

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