Twenty-Two Theses on Social Constructionism: A Feminist Response to Ibarra and Kitsuse's “Proposal for the Study of Social Problems”

This chapter explores critical-feminist challenges to social constructionism. It emphasizes the objectivist aspects of constructionism, and political interests associated with it. The chapter discusses an approach that blends aspects of poststructuralism with critical feminism. The approach involves taking political stands on public issues, and developing new ways of representing social conditions. Peter R. Ibarra and John I. Kitsuse&s;s An Interactionist Proposal for the Study of Social Problems promotes a topical and subject-centered view of social problems by focusing on how people "dynamically" and interactively engage in and constructively produce what counts as a social problem for them. The project for studying social problems Ibarra and Kitsuse propose, not only for themselves, but for all of us, who could claim an interest in social problems represents a quiet and polite assault on feminist and other explicitly "interested" social and cultural studies. It is a model for building a research machine that forecloses new technologies for investigating important questions of power.