Consider the following passage from “Beside Oneself,” by Judith Butler and drawing on examples from the text to support your analysis, explain how you are enmeshed in particular social contexts that determine how you behave within the social world, either based on your gender or some other social location (like race, class, ethnicity, sexual identity/orientation, nationality or otherwise):
“We come into the world on the condition that the social world is already there, laying the groundwork for us. This implies that I cannot persist without norms of recognition that support my persistence: the sense of possibility pertaining to me must first be imagined from someone else before I can begin to imagine myself” (Butler 32).
Use these questions to generate ideas for your essay: How did you become the person you are today? What messages or reinforcements from society (family, friends and the larger world are included here) have informed how you behave, identify, express and conceive of yourself? What is meant by the ‘sense of possibility’ in this passage?
