Un/doing Differences

Cultural realities are built through meaningful distinctions. The most socially consequential are those with which the discriminators themselves differentiate from one another: the practices of human differentiation. They occur in the course of the progressive differentiation and individualization of contemporary society in a previously unknown diversity, mixture, and situational contingency. Categorizations of the "human material" (Georg Simmel) compete with each other according to nation, ethnicity, gender, race, age, class, language, and religion, but also according to achievement and attractiveness classes, political and sexual orientation, body volume, dialects, or consumer preferences. In interactions, institutions, and discourses, these differentiations work partly in connection with each other, partly in cut-throat competition with other distinctions.