Considered sociologically and politically rather than philosophically, the “X is a construct” platform, thirty years ago, stood for solidarity with the political energies of the 1960s—above all, liberation movements in the name of race and gender. To say that gender was a construct was to make a political point. Ditto for maintaining that race was a construct. Stereotypes (that’s what they were called back then) that kept women and people of color in their place were not the verifiable truth about the world. Depictions of the non-Europeans to whom the imperial metropolis denied independence or whom it excluded from its borders were not the results of objective empirical observation; they were fictive generalizations that served unsavory interests. Circulating them perpetuated injustice. Behind constructionism, a project of denaturalizing categories of thought that were taken to be natural, there were large groups of people who had been trying to rectify how they were described and thus also their unjustifiable situation in the world, which the false descriptions enabled. Imagine the world differently, and you can make it better. Constructionism’s slogan was crude but politically mobilizing. Imagination is a form of politics.
Social science had put much of its authority behind the contrary assumption: “That’s their nature. We have studied the matter impartially. We know.” It was probably inevitable, especially in a moment when the shameful indifference of medical institutions to the HIV/AIDS crisis was still fresh in everyone’s mind, that constructionism would get hyperextended, that some would be willing to identify scientific knowledge, as such, with hegemonic power. That was not a position Social Text embraced—it’s not the argument of the other essays in the ill-fated “Science Wars” issue that included Sokal’s. By 1996, constructionism was already seen by many of the journal’s writers and readers as more of a problem than a solution. Diana Fuss had made the argument decisively seven years prior in her book Essentially Speaking. After all, who or what does the constructing? Patriarchy, racism, and capitalism are real historical agents, no? The journal’s origins were unapologetically Marxist. For Marxists, imagination is a force, yes, but it’s not imagined constructs all the way down.
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Know Thyself 