Seriality (gender studies)

Seriality or serial collectivity is a term that feminist scholar Iris Marion Young used to describe a reconceptualization of the category of woman in her 1994 essay Gender as Seriality. Young borrows the concept of seriality from Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, where he originally developed the idea to describe the relationship of individuals to social classes and the capitalist system of production and consumption. Understanding women as a series, rather than a group, entails the recognition that the category woman is not defined by any common biological or psychological characteristics; rather, individuals are positioned as woman by a set of material and immaterial social constructs that are the product of previous human actions.

A group, in Sartre's definition, is a collection of people who self-consciously recognize themselves to be in a unified relationship with each other in the undertaking of a common project. A mutual acknowledgment of actively shared goals is the chief feature of a group. Guilds, reading groups, addiction support groups and animal cruelty prevention groups are all examples of groups.

Seriality, in contrast to the active effort of group being, describes a level of social existence that is habitually constrained and directed by existing circumstances and material conditions. In a series, a collection of people are unified passively by objects, routines practices and habits around which their actions are oriented. For instance, people waiting in line for a bus, radio listeners, prison inmates and street theatre spectators are all examples of series. In each example, individuals are oriented toward the same goals by their response to existing conditions and structures in the environment, which are the collective legacy of human actions and decisions in the past. To illustrate concretely, the actions of people who stop and watch a street theatre performance may be shaped by existing conditions which constrain and permit their actions, such as the social acceptability of staging a performance on the street, the attractive costumes of the performers, high unemployment rates among actors, the existence of a public square, social expectations of their roles as spectators. Members of a series are anonymous and isolated, although not alone, often individuals in a series take into account the expected behavior of other members when pursuing their own actions – for instance, a bus rider may choose to avoid rush hour traffic. Members of a series are also interchangeable, although not identical, in relation to the objects that effect their serialized condition: from the point of view of a radio program broadcaster, one listener is interchangeable with another.

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