Being beneath the man maps onto cultural top-bottom hierarchies of superiority.

Evidence

A recurrent pattern emerges: the “top” attempts to reject and eliminate the “bottom” for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon the low-Other … but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear, and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level. It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 297 (#expands, via linked claim)

I remember seeing Harold Bloom’s learned volume Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human in a New York bookstore in 1999 and wondering about those who have not or cannot read Shakespeare—are they not human? If you prick them, will they not bleed? — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 54 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Humanity is implicitly defined through access to high culture — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 54; The socially peripheral becomes symbolically central through the top’s dependence on the low-Other — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 297; High culture is depicted as disarming the disenfranchised outsider.

Broader Connections

• The socially peripheral becomes symbolically central through the top’s dependence on the low-Other #expands (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 297
• Humanity is implicitly defined through access to high culture #expands (0.72) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 54
• High culture is depicted as disarming the disenfranchised outsider. #expands (0.72)