Human Subjectivity

Human subjectivity refers to the inner experience, perspective, feelings, and sense of self through which individuals perceive and interpret the world, and to the social processes through which people are constituted as subjects. Max Weber argued that sociology must grasp the subjective meaning of action, and Alfred Schutz's phenomenology examined how the lifeworld is experienced as meaningful. George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley showed that the self emerges through interaction and the perspectives of others, while Erving Goffman examined how people present and manage the self. Michel Foucault argued that subjects are produced by power and discourse, through disciplinary practices and technologies of the self, and Louis Althusser described interpellation, by which ideology hails individuals as subjects. Pierre Bourdieu's habitus links embodied dispositions to social position, and Judith Butler explored how subjects are formed through norms and performativity. Anthony Giddens analyzed the reflexive project of the self in late modernity, and Frantz Fanon examined the psychological effects of colonial subjection. Feminist and phenomenological scholars stress embodied experience. Human subjectivity remains central to research on identity, agency, power, emotion, and qualitative method.