Rosenblum&Travis "The Meaning of Difference"

I believe the authors thesis and main points that they are trying to get across is that there are many statuses in America and in all of them, there are problems. Rosenblum and Travis give support to this by writing, "Race, sex, class, and sexual orintation may be described as master statuses[. . . and] the term status conveys prestige." In the United States, prestige is defined to a limited people. The authors are going to examine how the master statuses are affected through different proccesses.
There are two types of ways to decribe a person, constructionist and essentailist (2). A constructionist "operates from the belief that conceptions [. . .] have no meaning except that given them by the observer." And an essentailist "presumes that items in a category all share some essential quality" (3). Giving a group or person a name can cause great disturbance and it can also cause "redefintion of self" (6). The government has created categories of people that is biased. The census does a great deal of this when it says to fill out an ethnicitcity. There are two processes called aggregating and disaggregating that either "lump together" people to a race or pull them away from eachother or deny another person (12). The proccess of Dichotomizing means to divide things down into seperate parts and look at them indepently (15). People have been known to dichotomize many things such as race. Which means the difference between white and nonwhite really. They do it to sexual orientation, when talking about staright and gay. The socail classes are also affected by this when saying poor, middle, and upper class. Sex can even be dichotomized even though there is usually only two set sex's but in those, situations have been known to happen. Disabilities aren't dichotomized but on the other hand they are socially constructed and looked at differently. Stigma is also used when talking about something not normal, it means "Bodily sign designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of and individual" (28).
Do you ever find yourself dichotomizing a class, race, sexual orientation, or sex?
Think about all the things you have ever done or written that could be Dichotomizing, is there a lot?

I really liked reading this article. It really made me think about things that i have done or seen lately. I can see where the author is coming from and they really opened my eyes to some new theorys. I instantly started asking my friends what they thought and they had no answer because they had never thought of things like that before. Overall I really like the chapter and can't wait to talk about it in class.