ABSTRACT

Social constructionism makes us radically question the assumptions underlying mainstream psychology. It focuses on identity and subjectivity in macro social constructionism. The concept of positioning illustrates how identities are derived from both subject positions in broad societal discourses and from positions claimed or resisted within social interactions. Sexuality offers an illustrative example of the way that discourses and the identities offer are tied to material power relations. The notion of subject positions has been taken up in a way that acknowledges the active mode in which persons endeavour to locate themselves within particular discourses during social interaction in the concept of positioning. The view of macro social constructionism by comparison sees human subjects as secondary to and as products of the discourses that structure their lives. The 'content' of such a being is hard to imagine; indeed whatever psychological processes are attributed to it can only have the status of by-products.