Villanueva, Stephen Edward M.

PHIHUM-O/BA-INTS-1

Social Postmodernism beyond Identity Politics: A Comprehensive Book Report

Society nowadays shifted to a multidimensional perspective of how to discuss social norms and
derivatives from the postmodernist approach and it is not hard to see why. To see a shift from a
traditionalist view say for example of feminism baffled many social theorist and social science
experts. Our way of thinking has evolved, how we deal with the growing trend of intracultural
and intercultural approaches, how to face the challenges of a growing critical theory The book
Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics tackles the different orientations of the society
that was left unhinged for quite some time now and how we should discuss these things in
multidimensional perspective that address the concerns of the theorist and social movers.

The book covers things such as the growing culture of the sexual community particularly the
issue of the interpretation of gay and lesbian culture in the Western and Eastern perspective.
There are many interpretations of being a gay or a lesbian in some parts of Africa particularly in
the tribal regions where their interpretations were mostly vague in rationality. The analysis of the
book is that gays and lesbians portray in Western culture may or may not be applied to countries
that are not really fully Westernized. Another theory that was being discussed in both Eastern
and Western approach was the notion of feminism in which women have roles to play in Eastern
and Western culture. It implies that strong women in Western countries tend to gain more weight
than their Eastern counterpart because of their advanced ideals and a sense of “cultural realism”.
Feminism can be protagonistic or antagonistic or can be neutral based on its status quo among
different states and non-nation states. There are different layers of feminism structure: radical,
progressive and liberal feminism. Currently these three branches of feminism dominated women
politics especially the women movement that conquered gender politics for quite some time now.
The last one to be discussed in the book was race and ethnicity and how it was constructed in
such a way that there is a borderline between race nationalism and nationalism by land. The book
suggest that being of different races and ethnicity was a result of a racial interpretation by
colonial countries who began the notion of races based on a given color, skin or physical
characteristics that separate them from the main social classes. In modern discussion, social
theorist argue that racial issues stemmed from the problems resulting from the biases of the
colonial ones which in turn was turn into conflicts within ethnic groups and races and differences
in terms of rights and privileges. This has resulted to a more discourse on what should the world
do to address these differences because as what social theorist argued, if the world does not
respond positively to the issue of race and intercultural derivability, then society will oversaw a
destabilization of the different social races and intervariability of problems that could result to a
more serious problem, race extinction such as what happened to the Jews in World War 2.
Before I will go deeper into the deeper contents of the book, first what is postmodernism? The
word postmodernism implies that truth can be obtained through knowledge and not by discovery.
The “regimes of truth” stays at it is because it was said and never been discovered. We claim
truth to be as it is because we are being told, the narrative that it is the truth and will stay as is
until another real truth arrives. However, we could not actually interpret full truthfulness because
we never have the intellect to discover or even grasp it, which means we will never understand
the true nature of truth until we could say that it is not. Now that the whole notion of
postmodernism has been established, we now see the big difference in what the book says than
what we actually know about the social structure.

Beyond the social structure that we already discerned and applied, we have never reached the
level of full social function ability because we never understand the full nature of our social
construction. For example, being a White can be many things, either you become the “agent of
truth” or can be “being of unscrupulous deceit” based on how they would portray in their society.
Part of it is because they never understand why they are being structured as it is because of their
color, it is them who interpreted and condensed their version of their race to be known as such by
the mainstream society. The book is a philosophical interpretation of social perspective regarding
our interpretation of sexuality, gender and race. It aims to bring up substantial discourse on why
our interpretation of, let us say being gay, is different from those of say, from let us say from an
Americanized Chinese. There are a lot to be pointed out about the book. First is how the book
interpreted sexuality as a political tool in gaining more awareness to the growing movement of
binary and non-binary differences. The queer theory was an example of a growing movement for
an interpretation of sexuality and gender interpretation based from geopolitical issues such as the
Pride movement. However, we could not say whether the theory is true or not because as what
the book suggests, everything that we know is not supposed to be believed because there are
other interpretations and different discourse on sexuality and gender as opposed to a single
theory.

In conclusion, the book ostensibly recognized the efforts of the social theorist to thoroughly
discuss social postmodernism in such a way that it discusses the connection of these issues to the
larger discourse of social interaction and interpretation which is the true nature of
postmodernism. From the concept of queer theory to the correlation of race and ethnicity and the
growing concept of nationalistic culture and politics, the social postmodernist gave us a brief but
concise idea of that are the root cause of these phenomena and divulge on the given concepts to
come up with a pragmatic analysis and interpretation of the said phenomena. The book expresses
their feelings in a delicate, pragmatic way of delivery of their complex analysis of the whole
structure.