Binary Thinking and Hegemony

Binary Thinking

• Binary thinking refers to categorizing 'whole' concepts into two-part dichotomies.
• Examples include: day/night, good/bad, natural/unnatural, black/white, abnormal/normal, happy/unhappy, light/dark, full/empty, young/old, educated/uneducated, Status/non-Status, urban/rural, developed/underdeveloped, and Order/Disorder.

Binary as Hegemony

• The two parts of a binary are not just treated asymmetrically but unequally.
• The relationship between two groups in a binary system is a hegemonic one.
• Hegemony is a hierarchical relation that is ideological, systemic, and institutional.

Hegemony

• Hegemony is a system of domination and subordination.
• It permeates the social relations of society.
• Societal power structures support hegemony.
• Antonio Gramsci articulated hegemony in the early 1900s in "Letters from Prison."

3 Categories or Properties of a Binary

• Opposites
• Mutually Exclusive
• Complementary

Essentialism/Essentialist Thinking

• Essentialism/essentialist thinking presumes a sameness or common nature among members of a group or category (e.g., women or Asian people).
• It attributes a fundamental, indispensable characteristic defining their membership to the members of a group.
• "Essentializing" assumes that members of a group share the same characteristic or same set of characteristics.

Institutional Domination

• Institutional domination involves discriminatory policies and practices within organizations and governments.
• Examples include voting laws, welfare laws, slavery laws, segregation laws, the Head Tax against Chinese immigrants, Japanese internment camps, residential school policies, and property laws of the Indian Act.

Individual Domination

• Individual domination describes discriminatory actions and beliefs of a person against members of a marginalized group.
• Gentrification

Systemic Domination

• Systemic domination includes discriminatory attitudes that are part of the norm, ideologies, and conventions of a society.
• Hegemony is normalized and naturalized due to the social entrenchment of institutional and individual domination.

Sociological Imagination

• Sociological imagination requires connecting the contours of our own lives to larger social, political, and economic elements that create the conditions for everyday life.
• The sociological imagination was coined by C. Wright Mills

Eurocentrism

• Eurocentrism assumes that events, history, knowledge, and information originating from Europe and Euro-descended people are superior, important, and more relevant as a standard to measure normalcy.

Colonialism

• Colonialism involves a foreign power dominating and exploiting an indigenous group by appropriating their land and resources, extracting their wealth, and using them as cheap labor.
• Racial doctrines and hierarchies reinforce patterns of superiority and inferiority.
• In Canada, colonialism describes the past and continued domination of Indigenous Peoples by European colonizers, constructing Indigenous Peoples as Other/inferior.

Capitalism

• Capitalism is an economic system of production relying on the exchange of one's labor for wages, producing profit for privileged classes.
• Owners (bourgeoisie) and a class of workers (proletariat) perpetuate capitalist modes of production.
• Wealth of the bourgeoisie is extracted through the exploitation of the proletariat.

In the Shadow of Gold Mountain (Karen Cho, 2004, 43 mins)

• Main thesis/objective & important dates
• Key themes include:
  • Global to local implications
  • Labour conditions
  • Institution of Family & Community & Friendship
  • Immigration Policies & Citizenship
  • Who feels entitled in Canada and why?
  • Community Organizing/Resistance; Politics of State apologies

Constructing the OTHER (The Normative Self)

• A dominating group and the marginalized group or "Other" are constructs.
• The dominating group takes its own identity and experience as the reference point of the society, culture, or species as a whole.
• Others are evaluated through their similarity or dissimilarity to that norm and viewed as inferior in their differences.
• The "Other," or marginalized group, is defined in terms of the functional significance or meaning that it holds for the dominating group rather than on its own terms.
• The "Other" are viewed and treated as different, exotic, and abnormal.
• The normative self is not determined by numerical majority but rather creation through political power.

Ideology

• Allows the group holding power to have maximum control with minimum conflict.
  • Process of legitimization and naturalization through values, conceptions, cultural practices and symbols.
  • Gramsci - "hegemony"
  • Althusser - "state ideological apparatuses: (churches, schools, family, and through cultural forms - lit, media)"

Subjectivity

• It may be thought of as "positionality" or "standpoint," creating knowledge through the various social categories inhabited.
• Knowledge is mediated by the identity and experiences of the knower.
• Oppressor and oppressed "subjectivities" are not equally recognized.

Discourse

• A system of knowledge that uses elements of shared cultural knowledge to produce a particular version of reality.
• Provides framework to understand & interpret the everyday world.
• Social constructionists argue that the material world only becomes meaningful through the concepts and systems of classification provided by language and discourses.

Emerging Nation-Building Discourses

• Image of re-conciliation and equality is part of the larger national mythology of Canadian identity as the "Benevolent Mountie."
• Signifies the glorious expansion of the nation and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples in the form of gentleness as a form of British superiority.
• The state is represented as the Mountie, and minority culture is represented as colonizer or colonized, in a friendly, peaceful, and collaborative way.

Explore binary thinking, its role in creating unequal power dynamics, and its connection to hegemony. Understand how binary categories like good/bad and urban/rural establish hierarchical relationships. Learn about the properties of a binary and the concept of essentialism.