Forgive me, Women’s Studies, for I have sinned. I never thought the day would come when I began to sympathize with the kid from Jesus Camp. Rachel is this little girl who is simultaneously cute and creepy as fuck as she tries to convert strangers to Christianity in the bowling alley (forward to around 8:00 to see the part I’m talking about). I fear I have become to think like her, Women’s Studies, and this scares me greatly. Not because I’ve suddenly found the evangelical lord that Rachel loves, but because some of my thinking habits are not unlike to hers.
I find myself screaming in my head or on paper about social constructionism. I get so frustrated in psychology classes, having to regurgitate this stuff about pathways, neurobiology and metabolisms, when it’s all just social construction. These ideas are not solid facts, they’re stories we tell ourselves as scientists. They’ve created, constructed and moulded this particular line of thinking into facts of the human mind and behaviour. If someone else had gotten there first, it could have been a completely different discourse; another understanding of biology entirely. Nothing is a fact, nothing is natural. Grass might be green, but that’s only because someone decided what grass is and how green looks.
How is this like Rachel? Because we’re both naive, but also determined and stubborn in our own point of view. She’s convinced of her lord, god and saviour, and just wishes people could think the way she does, and find their love for god. I don’t think we have the same desire to convert others even though I’ve labelled everything around me a social construction; unreal objects with pointless definition and meaning. I know and acknowledge that there are millions of other points of view, some of which should be considered, but secretly, I think I’m right.
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