The Individual Experience in a World of Categories :: Sociology Sociological Essays

The Individual Experience in a World of Categories Lakoff and Johnson argue for an embodied mind, saying that our categories are based on how we experience the world through our bodies. According to this theory, as a result of their different anatomies, men and women would experience the world differently and their categories would be inherently different. Also, it would be expected that all women would share the same categories. Our class and our discussions have demonstrated a diversity of opinions and methods of categorization that refute this part of Lakoff and Johnson's argument. I think that Lakoff and Johnson were correct in saying that "the categories we form are part of our experience" (Lakoff and Johnson 19). However, what they neglected to factor into their analysis of the way human beings categorize is the differences of each individual experience. Categories and their meanings are based on an individual's personal knowledge of the world, and that is why no category means exactly the same thing for more than one individual. I want to examine the categories of race and sexuality in Moraga and Delany to demonstrate the significance of the individual experience and its direct connection to categories. Also, I want to suggest that race as "other" is more problematic than sexuality to one's personal identity. Delany's "Aversion/Perversion/Diversion" presents us with a series of troubling tales. They all originate within Delany's life, but his reason for choosing these particular tales is "precisely because they are uncharacteristic" (Delany 125). Even within one's own individual experience, there is an uniqueness to events. The category "gay" doesn't mean that the individuals who identify themselves as part of it will share an understanding of all that it has meant for one person to claim this label for himself/herself. Delany acknowledges that the identification with others that categories create is in a way false, "even the similarities are finally, to the extent they are living ones, a play of differences" (Delany 131). He emphasizes that much of the sexual experience remains outside of language. No everything will be shared, not everything can be. An individual's journey to claiming his/her own identity is entrenched in the personal journey, in occurrences both characteristic and unch aracteristic. However, maybe these "uncharacteristic" tales are not as uncharacteristic to his experience as Delany believes. It is fact that they are indeed a part of Delany's experience as a gay man, and he says himself that there is no universal "gay experience.