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ONTOLOGICAL GERRYMANDERING IN THE NEW HISTORICISM
Kiss and Tell. By Julia Ericksen (with Sally A. Steffen). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, 270 pages. Cloth, $29.95.
Reviewed by Paul Okami, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095.
"Sexuality is not a trait with which individuals are born, but a crucial aspect of identity that is socially created" (Erickson, Kiss and Tell, p. 11).
When the history of "social constructionism" is constructed, let us hope that the authors have access to an obscure paper published in the journal Social Problems, titled "Ontological Gerrymandering: The Anatomy of Social Problems Explanations" (Woolgar & Pawluch, 1985). That article was written at a time when the term social construction was rather new, and usually applied to a form of sociological discourse championed by labeling theorists and other interactionists (e.g., Spector & Kituse, 1977; Best, 1990). Although I am an unabashed admirer of the social constructionist approach to social problems that Woolgar & Pawluch took to task, their critique was nevertheless apt. In my opinion, however, it would be even more productively applied to some of the new historicist writings of which the current volume is one, and of which I can't profess to be a great admirer (see D'emilio & Freedman, 1988, for another highly praised example).
Briefly, Woolgar & Pawluch's (1985) argument runs as follows: The central task of constructionist writings is to portray definitions of various phenomena and conditions as fluid, relative, and dependent upon sociohistorical forces. Constructionist theorists accomplish this by implicitly holding that at least some aspects of the phenomena under examination can be "objectively" characterized in some manner. They then demonstrate that whereas this objective phenomenal nature has remained constant, any changes in claims about the conditions or definitions regarding them must be entirely the result of associated sociohistorical changes.
However, as Woolgar & Pawluch (1985) write:
But how do authors manage to portray [their] statements about conditions and behaviors as objective while relativizing the definitions and claims made about them? The metaphor of ontological gerrymandering suggests the central strategy for accomplishing this move. The successful [social constructionist] explanation depends on making problematic the truth status of certain states of affairs selected for analysis and explanation, while [relegating to the background] or minimizing...