Social practices, on the Haslangerian picture just described, establish a structure of coordinated responses to resources. The fact that practices establish this structure is essential to understanding what social roles are and how they come to be. This is because, within the structure, we find a variety of social relations (or properties) stemming from practices. Exam-ples include relations between persons (e.g., being a parent/child of, be-ing a friend of, bebe-ing an employer/employee of) and relations between persons and things (e.g., exercising, eating, studying). These relations need not be pairwise — having black skin is a social relation as is being a triplet.11 By participating (willingly or unwillingly) in social practices, we enter into these social relations. For example, when someone adopts a child, they enter the relation of being a parent, because they partici-pate in the social practice of taking adoptive adults to be parents of the adopted child. Similarly, to participate in social practices surrounding cocktail parties might mean that one will enter relations like dressing up, drinking, or making small talk. And to participate in the social prac-tices surrounding law and crime might mean that, if one is judged to have performed a particular sort of action, they will lose some relations (such as being a citizen) and gain new ones (such as being a prisoner).
11 Often, social relations will be grounded in non-social facts about individuals and their relationships to others, as in the case of skin colors that are read as black and hair colors read as blond. What makes these relations social, on this account, is that they carry social meaning according to our shared social blueprints.
Social roles correspond to social relations in two ways. First, we are assigned social roles when we are perceived to stand in (or regularly en-gage in) enough of the social relations relevant to that role. That is, it is sufficient for an individual to be perceived as being saturated by the set of relations associated with a group.12
For example, it is plausible that a number of social relations are asso-ciated with persons who are women, such as relations of dress, speech, occupation, and presenting as female. It is not necessary that one is per-ceived to stand in all of these relations to be perper-ceived as a woman — it is sufficient to be perceived as standing in enough of these relations.13 Sec-ond, being assigned a social role can in turn affect what social relations we stand in.14 To flesh this out, we will begin with some examples.
Being perceived as occupying certain positions in certain social re-lations can immediately result in a new social role. Our first example picks out just this kind of role: Consider the many practices surround-ing American football. Our shared blueprint with respect to football leads to a number of shared behaviors, thoughts, and affects. Millions
12This is not to suggest that every group has an associated social role. Rather, being perceived as saturating the conditions for membership in a group will result in occu-pying a role only where that collection of practices matters (to some degree) to some surrounding social group.
13 We draw an analogy here with the notion of ‘genericity’ common in linguistics.
Generics are fault-tolerant constructions like “birds fly”, for which the existence of individuals that do not meet the description does not falsify the description. We take it that many of the membership criteria for social roles are best understood as being fault tolerant in a similar way.
14On this point, we disagree with Haslanger, who requires both regular participation in a social practice to have the corresponding social role, and who does not allow that one can occupy a social role simply by virtue of being perceived to participate in a social practice. This gap between participation and perceived participation will be particularly important in our later discussion of ‘passing’ — that is, occupying a social role without in fact having the corresponding social relation (e.g., a homosexual who is perceived and so treated as a heterosexual, a black person who is perceived and so treated as white). (See §4.5).
of Americans attend football games, purchase team memorabilia, sell and trade tickets, and feel elation and devastation based on game out-comes. Out of these and other practices comes an array of social re-lations, but central among them is the relation between a professional football player and a professional football team. By signing a contract with a professional football team, an individual (say, Dan Marino) im-mediately comes to stand in this relation — one that is established by the practices surrounding football.
Occupying this relation carries immense and immediate social force when it is recognized by other persons. Upon signing, Marino became subject to new expectations (such as attending practices and games), gained new rights (such as a right to receive payment from the team), and also gained a new social status as an athletic celebrity. These rights, expectations, and status are all part of the social role of professional football player. By occupying this role, Marino also entered into var-ious social relations, such as being an employee and having fans.15
Other social relations result in social roles, but do not do so with the same immediacy — rather, one takes on these roles by being perceived to habitually and regularly stand in the social relations associated with that role. Consider, for example, the social relation of organizing events.
In many academic departments, a small number of faculty members regularly volunteer to organize department events. Occasionally enter-ing into this relation may not affect their role in the department. But,
15Similar things can be said of the relations parent of, convicted of, or spouse of
— if perceived to occupy these relations, they typically immediately result in being assigned a social role that brings along with it new social relations, expectations and/or rights.
by being perceived to consistently take on this task, a faculty member may find herself assigned a new social role: being an organizer. Occupy-ing this social role will, in turn, relate one in new ways to other people and things: it might become expected of those individuals that they will organize events, they may face disproportionate disapprobation if they fail to do so, they might be given access to event funds, and so on. And all of this, we might imagine, will go along with occupying the role of organizer, and will only come about when someone is perceived to reg-ularly participate in practices surrounding the organization of events.
Organizing one event, in this sort of scenario, is not enough to be as-signed the role of organizer.
Regardless of whether a social role is assigned immediately, or on the basis of regular participation in a social practice, the structural re-lationship between practices, relations, and roles is similar: participat-ing in practices places one into social relations, and beparticipat-ing perceived to occupy (or regularly occupy) certain social relations may lead to being assigned a corresponding social role. (We grant that it is a contingent matter whether a given social group has a corresponding social role, or more than one corresponding social role.) We can express this relation-ship between social relations and corresponding social roles as follows:
In general, if the condition for occupying a certain position in a social relation is having (enough of) properties P1. . . Pn, the condition for occupying a corresponding social role is being perceived and treated as having (enough of) properties P1. . . Pn.
Such assignment to a social role typically brings with it additional norms,
expectations, and rights regarding one’s behavior, thought and affect.16 For simplicity’s sake, we have been speaking as though a unique set of relations is associated with each group throughout this section. This will not always be the case, however. Rather, many groups (perhaps most) will have distinct (though overlapping) sets of relations associated with them. As a result, multiple social roles may be associated with a single social group. And while we understand that this sketch of social roles leave much of this complexity under-explored, we leave a richer exam-ination to future work.