Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled
identity.
Stigma and Social Identity 1
Preliminary Conceptions (p. 2)
Thus, the demands that we make might better be
called demands “in effect,” and the character we impute to the individual might
better be seen as an imputation made in potential retrospect - a
characterization “in effect,” a virtual social identity. The category and attributes he could in fact
be proved to possess will be called his actual social identity. (2)
The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to
an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language
of relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor
can confirm the usualness of another, and therefore is neither creditable nor
discreditable as a thing in itself. (3)
The term stigma and its synonyms conceal a double
perspective: does the stigmatized individual assume his differentness
is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does he assume it is
neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the first case one deals
with the plight of the discreditied, in the
second with that of the discreditable. This is an important difference,
even though a particular stigmatized individual is likely to have experience
with both situations. (4)
Three grossly different types of stigma may be
mentioned. First, there are abominations
of the body - the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual
character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions,
treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a
known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction,
alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical
political behavior. Finally there are
the tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be
transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a
family. In all of these various
instances of stigma, however, including those the Greeks had in mind, the same
sociological features are found: an individual who might have been received
easily in ordinary social intercourse possesses a trait that can obtrude itself
upon attention and turn those of us whom he meets away from him, breaking the
claim that his other attributes have on us.
He possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness
from what we had anticipated. We and
those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I
shall call normals. (5)
The central feature of the stigmatized
individual’s situation in life can now be stated. It is a question of what is often, if
vaguely, called “acceptance.” Those who
have dealings with him fail to accord him the respect and regard which
uncontaminated aspects of his social identity have led them to anticipate
extending, and have him to anticipate receiving; he echoes this denial by
finding that some of his own attributes warrant it. (8-9)
Given what both the stigmatized and we normals introduce into mixed social situations, it is
understandable that all will not go smoothly.
We are likely to attempt to carry on as though in fact he wholly fitted
one of the types of person naturally available to us in the situation, whether
this means treating him as someone better than we feel he might be or someone
worse than we feel he probably is. If
neither of these tacks is possible, then we may try to act as if he were a “non-person,”
and not present at all as someone of whom ritual notice is to be taken. He, in turn, is likely to go along with these
strategies, at least initially. (18)
In social situations with an individual known or
perceived to have a stigma, we are likely, then, to employ categorizations that
do not fit, and we and he are likely to experience uneasiness. Of course, there is often significant
movement from this starting point. And
since the stigmatized person is likely to be more often faced with these
situations than are we, he is likely to become more adept at managing
them. (19)
The Own and the Wise (19)
Earlier it was suggested that a discrepancy may
exist between an individual’s virtual and actual identity. This discrepancy, when known about or
apparent, spoils his social identity; it has the effect of cutting him off from
society and from himself so that he stands a discredited person facing an unaccepting world.
In some cases, as with the individual who is born without a nose, he may
continue through life to find that he is the only one of his kind and that all the world is against him. In most cases, however, he will find that
there are sympathetic others who are ready to adopt his standpoint in the world
and to share with him the feeling that he is human and “essentially” normal in
spite of appearances and in spite of his own self-doubts. Two such categories will be considered.
(19-20)
The first set of sympathetic others is of course
those who share his stigma. Knowing from
their own experience what it is like to have this particular stigma, some of
them can provide the individual with instruction in the tricks of the trade and
with a circle of lament to which he can withdraw for moral support and for the
comfort of feeling at home, at ease, accepted as a person who really is like
any other normal person. (20)
Among his own, the stigmatized individual can use
his disadvantage as a basis for organizing life, but he must resign himself to
a half-world to do so. Here he may
develop to its fullest his sad tale accounting for his possession of the
stigma. (21)
On the other hand, he may find that the tales of
his fellow sufferers bore him, and that the whole matter of focusing on
atrocity tales, on group superiority, on trickster stories, in short, on the
“problem,” is one of the large penalties for having one. (21)
The term “category” is perfectly abstract and can
be applied to any aggregate, in this case persons with
a particular stigma. A good portion of
those who fall within a given stigma category may well refer to the total
membership by the term “group” or an equivalent, such as “we,” or “our
people.” Those outside the category may
similarly designate those within it in group terms. However, often in such cases the full
membership will not be part of a single group, in the strictest sense; they
will neither have capacity for collective action, nor a stable and embracing
pattern of mutual interaction. What one
does find is that the members of a particular stigma category will have a
tendency to come together into small social groups whose members all derive
from the category, these groups themselves being subject to overarching
organization to various degrees. And one
also finds that when one member of the category happens to come into contact
with another, both may be disposed to modify their treatment of each other by
virtue of believing that they each belong to the same “group.” Further, in being a member of the category,
an individual may have an increased probability of coming into contact with any
other member, and even forming a relationship with him as a result. A category, then, can function to dispose its
members to group-formation and relationships, but its total membership does not
thereby constitute a group - a conceptual nicety will hereafter not always be
observed in this essay. (23-24)
I have considered one set of individuals from
whom the stigmatized person can expect some support: those who share his stigma
and by virtue of this are defined and define themselves as his own kind. The second set are - to borrow a term once
used by homosexuals - the “wise,” namely, persons who are normal but whose
special situation has made them intimately privy to the secret life of the
stigmatized individual and sympathetic with it, and who find themselves
accorded a measure of acceptance, a measure of courtesy membership in the
clan. Wise persons are marginal men
before whom the individual with a fault need feel no shame nor exert self-control,
knowing that in spite of his failing he will be seen as an ordinary other. (28)
One type of wise person is he whose wiseness comes from working in an establishment which
caters either to the wants of those with a particular stigma or to actions that
society takes in regard to these persons. (29)
A second type of wise person is the individual
who is related through the social structure to a stigmatized individual - a
relationship that leads the wider society to treat both individuals in some
respects as one...In general, the tendency for a stigma to spread from the
stigmatized individual to his close connection provides a reason why such
relations tend either to be avoided or to be terminated where existing. (30)
Moral Career (32)
Persons who have a particular stigma tend to have
similar learning experience regarding their plight, and similar changes in
conception of self - a similar “moral career” that is both cause and effect of
commitment to a similar sequence of personal adjustments...One phase of this
socialization process is that through which the stigmatized person learns and
incorporates the standpoint of the normal, acquiring thereby the identity
beliefs of the wider society and a general idea of what it would be like to
possess a particular stigma. Another
phase is that through which he learns that he possesses a particular stigma
and, this time in detail, the consequence of possessing it. The timing and interplay of these two initial
phases of the moral career form important patterns, establishing the foundation
for later development, and providing a means of distinguishing among the moral
careers available to the stigmatized.
(32)
It may be added that in looking back to the
occasion of discovering that persons with his stigma are human beings like
everyone else, the individual may bring to bear a later occasion when his
pre-stigma friends imputed un-humanness to those he had by then learned to see
as full-fledged persons like himself.
Thus, in reviewing her experience as a circus worker, a young girl sees
first that she had learned her fellow-workers are not freaks, and second that
her pre-circus friends fear for her having to travel in a bus along with other
members of the troupe. (40)
Another turning point - retrospectively if not
originally - is the isolating,
incapacitating experience, often a period of hospitalization, which comes later
to be seen as the time when the individual was able to think through his
problem, learn about himself, sort out his situation, and arrive at a new
understanding of what is important and worth seeking in life. (40)
2. Information Control and Personal Identity (41)
The Discredited and the Discreditable
The cooperation of a stigmatized person with normals in acting as if his known differentness
were irrelevant and not attended to is one main possibility in the life of such
a person. However, when his differentness is not immediately apparent, and is not known
beforehand (or at least known by him to be known by others), when in fact his
is a discreditable, not a discredited, person, then the second main possibility
in his life is to be found. The issue is
not that of managing tension generated during social contacts, but rather that
of managing information about his failing.
To display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not
to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when, and
where. (42)
Social Information (43)
The information of most relevance in the study of
stigma has certain properties. It is
information about an individual. It is
about his more or less abiding characteristics, as opposed to the moods,
feelings, or intents that he might have at a particular moment. The information, as well as the sign through
which it is conveyed, is reflexive and embodied; that is, it is conveyed by the
very person it is about, and conveyed through bodily expression in the
immediate presence of those who receive the expression. Information possessing
all of these properties I will here call “social.” Some signs that convey social information may
be frequently and steadily available, and routinely sought and received; these
signs may be called “symbols.” (43)
Prestige symbols can be contrasted to stigma
symbols, namely, signs which are especially effective in drawing attention
to a debasing identity discrepancy, breaking up what would otherwise be a
coherent overall picture, with a consequent reduction in our valuation of the
individual. (43-44)
In addition to prestige symbols and stigma
symbols, one further possibility is found, namely, a sign that tends - in fact
or hope - to break up an otherwise coherent picture but in this case in a
positive direction desired by the actor, not so much establishing a new claim
as throwing a severe doubt on the validity of the virtual one. I shall refer here to disidentifiers. (44)
A final point about social information must be
raised; it has to do with the informing character of the “with” relationship in
our society. To be “with” someone is to
arrive at a social occasion in his company, walk with him down a street, be a
member of his party in a restaurant, and so forth. The issue is that in certain circumstances
the social identity of those an individual is with can be used as a source of
information concerning his own social identity, the assumption being that he is
what the others are. The extreme,
perhaps, is the situation in criminal circles: a person wanted for arrest can
legally contaminate anyone he is seen with, subjecting them to arrest on
suspicion. (47)
Visibility (48)
Since it is through our sense of sight that the
stigma of others most frequently becomes evident, the term visibility is
perhaps not too misleading. Actually,
the more general term, “perceptibility” would be more accurate and “evidentness” more accurate still. A stammer, after all, is a very “visible”
defect, but in the first instance because of sound, not sight. (48)
First, the visibility of a stigma must be
distinguished from its “known-about-ness.”
When an individual’s stigma is very visible, his merely contacting
others will cause his stigma to be known about.
But whether others know about the individual’s stigma will depend on
another factor in addition to its current visibility, namely, whether or not
they have previous knowledge about him - and this can be based on gossip about
him or a previous contact with him during which his stigma was visible. (49)
Secondly, visibility must be distinguished from
one of its particular bases, namely, obtrusiveness. When a stigma is immediately perceivable, the
issue still remains as to how much it interferes with the flow of interaction.
(49)
Thirdly, the visibility of a stigma (as well as
its obtrusiveness) must be disentangled from certain possibilities of what can
be called its “perceived focus.” We normals develop conceptions whether objectively grounded or
not, as to the sphere of life-activity for which an individual’s particular
stigma primarily disqualifies him.
(49-50)
In general, then, the decoding capacity of the
audience must be specified before one can speak of degree of visibility. (51)
Personal Identity (51)
Instead, then, of thinking of a continuum of
relationships, with categoric and concealing treatment at one end and
particularistic, open treatment at the other, it might be better to think of
various structures in which contact occurs and is stabilized - public streets
and their strangers, perfunctory service relations, the workplace, the
neighborhood, the domestic scene - and to see that in each case characteristic
discrepancies are likely to occur between virtual and actual social identity,
and characteristic efforts are made to manage the situation. (55)
And yet, the whole problem of managing stigma is
influenced by the issue of whether or not the stigmatized person is known to us
personally. To attempt to describe just
what this influence is, however, requires the clear formulation of an
additional concept, personal identity. (55)
By personal identity, I have in mind only
the first two ideas - positive marks or identity pegs,
and the unique combination of life history items that comes to be attached to
the individual with the help of these pegs for identity. Personal identity, then, has to do with the
assumption that the individual can be differentiated from all the others and
that around this means of differentiation a single continuous record of social
facts can be attached, entangled, like candy floss, becoming then the sticky
substance to which still other biographical facts can be attached. What is difficult to appreciate is that
personal identity can and does play a structured, routine, standardized role in
social organization just because of its one-of-a-kind quality. (57)
Biography (62)
Given these assumptions about the nature of
personal identity, a factor emerges that will be relevant for this report: degree
of “informational connectedness.” Given
the social facts about a person, the kind of facts reported in his obituary,
how close to each other or how distant is a given pair of them as measured by
the frequency with which those which know either fact will also know the
other? More generally, given the body of
important social facts about the individual, in what degree do those who know
some know many? (63)
In general, norms regarding social identity, as
earlier implied, pertain to the kinds of role repertoires or profiles we feel
it permissible for any given individual to sustain - “social personality,” as
Lloyd Warner used to say. (63)
It can be assumed that the possession of a
discreditable secret failing takes on a deeper meaning when the persons to whom
the individual has not yet revealed himself are not strangers to him but
friends. Discovery prejudices not only
the current social situation, but established relationships as well; not only
the current image others present have of him, but also the one they will have
in the future; not only appearances, but also reputation. The stigma and the effort to conceal it or
remedy it become “fixed” as part of personal identity. Here our increased willingness to chance
improper behavior when wearing a mask, or when away from home; hence the
willingness of some to publish revelatory material anonymously, or to make a
public appearance before a small private audience, the assumption being that
the disclosure will not be connected to them personally by the public at large.
(65)
Biographical Others
Personal identity, like social identity, divides
up the individual’s world of others for him.
The division is first between the knowing and the unknowing. The knowing are those who have a personal
identification of the individual; they need only see him or hear his name to
bring this information into play. The
unknowing are those for whom the individual constitutes an utter stranger,
someone of whom they have begun no personal biography (66).
By the term cognitive recognition, I shall
refer to the perceptual act of “placing” an individual, whether as having a
particular social identity or a particular personal identity. Recognition of social identities is a
well-known gate-keeping function of many servers. It is less well known that recognition of
personal identities is a formal function in some organizations. (67)
They will have the right and the obligation of
exchanging a nod, a greeting, or a chat with him when they find themselves in
the same social situation with him, this constituting social recognition.
(68)
In the everyday life of an average person there
will be long stretches of time when events involving him will be memorable to
no one, a technical but not active part of his biography. Only a serious personal accident or the
witnessing of a murder will create moments during these dead periods which have
a place in the reviews he and others come to make of his past...On the other
hand, notables who come to have a book-length biography written about them, and
especially those such as royalty who are known from the start to be destined
for this fate, will find they have experienced few periods of life which are
allowed to remain dead, that is, inactively part of their biography. (69)
An individual, then, may be seen as the central
point in a distribution of persons who either merely know about him or know him
personally, all of whom may have somewhat different amounts of information
concerning him. Let me repeat that
although the individual’s daily round will routinely bring him into contacts
with individuals who know him differently, These differences will ordinarily
not be incompatible; in fact, some kind of single biographical structure will
be sustained. A man’s relationship to
his boss and his relationships to his child may be vastly different, so that he
cannot easily play the part of employee while playing the part of father, but
should the man, while walking with his child, meet his boss, a greeting and
introduction will be possible without either the child or the boss both having
known of the existence and role of the other.
The well-established etiquette of the “courtesy introduction,” in fact,
assumes that the person we have a role relation to quite properly has other
kinds of relationships to other kinds of persons. I assume, then, that the apparently haphazard
contacts of everyday life may still constitute some kind of structure holding
the individual to one biography, and this in spite of the multiplicity of
selves that role and audience segregation allow him. (72)
Passing (73)
Given these several possibilities that fall
between the extremes of complete secrecy on the one hand and complete
information on the other, it would seem that the problems people face who make
a concerted and well-organized effort to pass are problems that wide ranges of
persons face at some time or other.
Because of the great rewards in being considered normal, almost all
persons who are in a position to pass will do so on some occasion by
intent. Further, the individual’s stigma
may relate to matters which cannot be appropriately divulged to strangers. (74)
When an individual in effect or by intent passes,
it is possible for a discrediting to occur because of what becomes apparent
about him, apparent even to those who socially identify him solely on the basis
of what is available to any stranger in the social situation. (75)
If there is something discreditable about an
individual’s past or present, it would seem that the precariousness of his
position will vary directly with the number of persons who are in on the
secret; the more who know about his shady side the more treacherous the
situation. Hence it may be safer for a
bank teller to dally with his wife’s girlfriend than to go to the races. (77)
Control of identity information has a special
bearing on relationships. Relationships
can necessitate time spent together, and the more time the individual spends
with another the more chance the other will acquire discrediting information
about him. Further, as already
suggested, every relationship obliges the related persons to exchange an
appropriate amount of intimate facts about self, as evidence of trust and
mutual commitment. Close relationships
that the individual had before he came to have something to conceal therefore
become compromised, automatically deficient in shared information. Newly formed or “post-stigma” relationships
are very likely to carry the discreditable person past the point where he feels
it has been honorable to him to withhold the facts. And, in some cases, even very fleeting
relationships can constitute a danger, since the small talk suitable between
strangers who have struck up a conversation can touch on secret failings, as
when the wife of an impotent husband must answer questions as to how many
children she had and, having none, why so.
(86-87)
Techniques of Information Control (91)
It has been suggested that an individual’s social
identity divides up the world of people and places for him, and that his
personal identity does this too, although differently. It is these frames of reference one must
apply in studying the daily round of a particular stigmatized person, as he
wends his way to and from his place of work, his place of residence, his place
of shopping, and the places where he participates in recreation. A key concept here is the daily round, for it
is the daily round that links the individual to his several social
situations. And one studies the daily
round with a special perspective in mind.
To the extent that the individual is a discredited person, one looks for
the routine cycle of restrictions he faces regarding social acceptance; to the
extent that he is discreditable, for the contingencies he faces in managing
information about himself. (91)
Some of the common techniques the individual with
a secret defect employs in managing crucial information about himself can now
be considered...Obviously one strategy is to conceal or obliterate signs that
have come to be stigma symbols.
Name-changing is a well-known example.
(92)
Another strategy of those who pass is to present
the signs of their stigmatized failing as signs of another attribute, one that
is less significantly a stigma. (94)
A very widely employed strategy of the
discreditable person is to handle his risks by dividing the world into a large
group to whom he tells nothing, and a small group to whom he tells all and upon
whose help he then relies; he co-opts for his masquerade just those individuals
who would ordinarily constitute the greatest danger. (95)
It should be added that intimates not only help
the discreditable person in his masquerade but can also carry this function
past the point of the beneficiary’s knowledge; they can in fact serve as a
protective circle, allowing him to think he is more fully accepted as a normal
person than in fact is the case. They
will therefore be more alive to his differentness and
its problems than he will himself. Here,
certainly, the notion that stigma management only concerns the stigmatized
individual and strangers is inadequate.
(97)
Earlier it was suggested that learning to pass
constitutes one phase in the socialization of the stigmatized person and a
turning point in his moral career. I
want to suggest now that the individual can come to feel that he should be
above passing, that if he accepts himself and respects himself he will feel no
need to conceal his failing. After
laboriously learning to conceal, then, the individual may go on to unlearn this
concealment. It is here that voluntary
disclosure fits into the moral career, a sign of one of its phases. It should be added that in the published
autobiographies of stigmatized individuals, this phase in the moral career is
typically described as the final, mature, well-adjusted one - a state of grace
I will attempt to consider later.
Covering (102)
A sharp distinction has been drawn between the
situation of the discredited with tension to manage and the situation of the
discreditable with information to manage.
The stigmatized employ an adaptive technique, however, which requires
the student to bring together these two possibilities. The difference between visibility and
obtrusiveness is involved. (102)
It is a fact that persons who are ready to admit
possession of a stigma (in many cases because it is known about or immediately
apparent) may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming
large. The individual’s object is to
reduce tension, that is, to make it easier for himself and the others to
withdraw covert attention from the stigma, and to sustain spontaneous
involvement in the official content of the interaction. However, the means employed for this task are
quite similar to those employed in passing - and in some cases identical, since
what will conceal a stigma from unknowing persons may also ease matters for
those in the know. It is thus that a
girl who gets around best on her wooden peg employs crutches or an artful but
patently artificial limb in company.
This process will be referred to as covering. Many of those who rarely try to pass, routinely try to cover. (102)
One type of covering involves the individual in a
concern over the standards incidentally associated with his stigma. (102)
A related type of covering involves an effort to
restrict the display of those failings most centrally identified with a stigma.
(103)
The most interesting expression of covering,
perhaps, is that associated with the organization of social situations. As
already suggested, anything which interferes directly
with the etiquette and mechanics of communication obtrudes itself constantly
into the interaction and is difficult to disattend
genuinely. Hence individuals with a
stigma, especially whose with a physical handicap, may have to learn about the
structure of interaction in order to learn about the lines along which they
must reconstitute their conduct if they are to minimize the obtrusiveness of
their stigma. From their efforts, then,
one can learn about features of interaction that might otherwise be too much
taken for granted to be noted. (103-104)
Group
Alignment and Ego Identity
(105)
In this essay an attempt has been made to
distinguish between social and personal identity. Both types of identity can be better
understood by bracketing them together and contrasting them to what Erikson and others have called “ego” or “felt” identity,
namely, the subjective sense of his own situation and
his own continuity and character that an individual comes to obtain as a result
of his various social experiences. (105)
The concept of social identity allowed us to
consider stigmatization. The concept of
personal identity allowed us to consider the role of information control in
stigma management. The idea of ego
identity allows us to consider what the individual may feel about stigma and
its management, and leads us to give special attention to the advice he is
given regarding these matters. (106)
Ambivalence (106)
Given that the stigmatized individual in our
society acquires identity standards which he applies to himself in spite of failing
to conform to them, it is inevitable that he will feel
some ambivalence about his own self.
Some expressions of this ambivalence have already been described in
connection with the oscillations of identification and association the individual
exhibits regarding his fellow-stigmatized.
(106-107)
The stigmatized individual exhibits a tendency to
stratify his “own” according to the degree to which their stigma is apparent
and obtrusive. (107)
Linked with this self-betraying kind of
stratification is the issue of social alliances, namely, whether the
individual’s choice of friends, dates, and spouse will be held to his own group
or occur “across the line.” (107)
It is only to be expected that this identity
ambivalence will receive organized expression in the written, talked, acted,
and otherwise presented materials of representatives of the group. Thus, in the
published and stage-performed humor of the stigmatized is to be found a special
kind of irony. Cartoons, jokes, and folk
tales display unseriously the weaknesses of a stereo-typical
member of the category, even while this half-hero is made to guilelessly outwit
a normal of imposing status. The serious
presentations of the representatives can exhibit a similar ambivalence, telling
of a similar self-alienation. (108)
Professional Presentations (108)
It has been suggested that the stigmatized
individual defines himself as no different from any
other human being, while at the same time he and those around him define him as
someone set apart. Given this basic
self-contradiction of the stigmatized individual it is understandable that he
will make some effort to find a way out of his dilemma, if only to find a
doctrine which makes consistent sense out of his situation. In contemporary society, this means that the
individual will not only attempt on his own to hammer out such a code, but
that, as already suggested, professionals will help out - sometimes in the
guise of telling their life story or of telling how they handled a difficult
situation. (109)
It should be plain that these advocated codes of
conduct provide the stigmatized individual not merely
with a platform and a politics, and not merely with instruction as to how to
treat others, but with recipes for an appropriate attitude regarding the
self. To fail to adhere to the code is
to be a self-deluded, misguided person; to succeed is to be both real and
worthy, two spiritual qualities that combine to produce what is called
“authenticity.” (111)
In-Group Alignments (112)
Although these proposed philosophies of life,
these recipes of being, are presented as though from the stigmatized
individual’s personal point of view, on analysis it is apparent that something
else informs them. This something else
is groups, in the broad sense of like-situated individuals, and this is only to
be expected, since what an individual is, or could be, derives from the place
of his kind in the social structure.
(112)
One of these groups is the aggregate formed by
the individual’s fellow-sufferers. The
spokesmen of this group claim that the individual’s real group, the one to
which he naturally belongs, is this group. All the other categories and
groups to which the individual necessarily also belongs are implicitly
considered to be not his real ones; he is not really one of them. The individual’s real group, then, is the
aggregate of persons who are likely to suffer the same deprivations as he
suffers because of having the same stigma; his real “group,” in fact, is the category
which can serve as his discrediting.
(112-113)
Out-Group Alignments (114)
The individual’s “own” group, then, may inform
the code of conduct professionals advocate for him. The stigmatized individual is also asked to
see himself from the point of view of a second grouping: the normals and the wider society that they constitute.
(114-115)
The language of this stance inspired by normals is not so much political, as in the previous case,
as it is psychiatric - the imagery of mental hygiene being employed as a source
of rhetoric. He who adheres to the
advocated line is said to be mature and to have achieved a good personal
adjustment; he who does not follow the line is said to be an impaired person,
rigid, defensive, with adequate inner resources. (115)
The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as
to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him
different from us; at the same time he must keep himself at that remove from us
which ensures our painlessly being able to confirm this belief about him. Put differently, he is advised to reciprocate
naturally with an acceptance of himself and us, an acceptance of him that we
have not quite extended him in the first place.
A phantom acceptance is thus allowed to provide for a phantom
normalcy. So deeply, then, must he
be caught up in the attitude to the self that is defined as normal in our
society, so thoroughly must he be a part of this definition, that he can
perform this self in a faultless manner to an edgy audience that is
half-watching him in terms of another show.
He can even be led to join with normals in
suggesting to the discontented among his own that the slights they sense are
imagined slights - which of course is likely at times, because at many social
boundaries the markers are designed to be so faint as to allow everyone to
proceed as though fully accepted, and this means that it will be realistic to
be oriented to minimal signs perhaps not meant.
(122)
The Politics of Identity (123)
The in-group and the out-group, then, both
present an ego identity for the stigmatized individual, the first largely in
political phrasings, the second in psychiatric ones. The individual is told that if he adopts the
right line (which line depending on who is talking), he will have come to terms
with himself and be a whole man; he will be an adult with dignity and
self-respect. (123)
And in truth he will have accepted a self for
himself; but this self is, as it necessarily must be,
a resident alien, a voice of the group that speaks for and through him. (123)
Thus, even while the stigmatized individual is
told that he is a human being like everyone else, he is being told that it
would be unwise to pass or to let down “his” group. In brief, he is told he is like anyone else
and that he isn’t - although there is little agreement among spokesmen as to
how much of each he should claim to be.
This contradiction and joke is his fate and his destiny. It constantly challenges those who represent the
stigmatized, urging these professionals to present a coherent politics of identity,
allowing them to be quick to see the “inauthentic” aspects of other recommended
programs but slow indeed to see that there may be no “authentic” solution at
all. (124)
The stigmatized individual thus finds himself in
an arena of detailed argument and discussion
concerning what he ought to think of himself, that is, his ego identity. To his other troubles he must add that of
being simultaneously pushed in several directions by professionals who tell him
what he should do and feel about what he is and isn’t, and all this purportedly
in his own interests. To write or give
speeches advocating any one of these “avenues of flight” is an interesting
solution in itself, but one that is denied, alas, to most of those who merely
read and listen. (124-125)
4. The Self and Its Other (126)
This essay deals with the situation of the
stigmatized person and his response to the spot he is in. In order to place the resulting framework in
its proper conceptual context, it will be useful to consider from different
angles the concept of deviation, this being a bridge which liks
the study of stigma to the study of the rest of the social world. (126)
Deviations and Norms (p 126)
One can say, then, that identity norms breed
deviations as well as conformance. Two general
solutions to this normative predicament were cited earlier. One solution was for a category of persons to
support a norm but be defined by themselves and others as not the relevant
category to realize the norm and personally to put it into practice. A second solution was for the individual who
cannot maintain an identity norm to alienate himself from the community which
upholds the norm, or refrain from developing an attachment to the community in
the first place. This is of course a
costly solution both for society and for the individual, even if it is one that
occurs in small amounts all the time.
(129)
The processes detailed here constitute together a
third main solution to the problem of unsustained
norms. Through these processes the
common ground of norms can be sustained far beyond the circle of those who
fully realize them; this is a statement, of course, about the social function
of these processes and not about their cause or their desirability. Passing and covering are involved, providing
the student with a special application of the arts of impression management,
the arts, basic in social life, through which the individual exerts strategic
control over the image of himself and his production that others glean from
him. Also involved is a form of tacit
cooperation between normals and the stigmatized: the
deviator can afford to remain attached to the norm because others are careful
to respect his secret, pass lightly over its disclosure, or disattend
evidence which prevents a secret from being made of it; these others, in turn,
can afford to extend this tactfulness because the stigmatized will voluntarily
refrain from pushing claim for acceptance much past the point normals find comfortable. (129-130)
The
It should be seen, then, that stigma management
is a general feature of society, a process occurring
wherever there are identity norms. The
same features are involved whether a major differentness
is at question, of the kind traditionally defined as stigmatic, or a picayune differentness, of which the shamed person is ashamed to be
ashamed. One can therefore suspect that
the role of normal and the role of stigmatized are parts of the same complex,
cuts from the same standard cloth. Of
course, psychiatrically oriented students have often pointed out the
pathological consequence of self-derogation, just as they have argued that
prejudice against a stigmatized group can be a form of sickness. These extremes, however, have not concerned
us, for the patterns of response and adaptation considered in this essay seem
totally understandable within a framework of normal psychology. One can assume first that persons with
different stigmas are in an appreciably similar situation and respond in an
appreciably similar way. The neighborly
druggist might talk to the neighborhood, therefore
neighborhood drugstores have been avoided by persons seeking all manner of
equipment and medications - persons wonderfully diverse who share nothing but a
need to control information. And secondly,
one can assume that the stigmatized and the normal have the same mental
make-up, and this necessarily is the standard one in our society; he who can
play one of these roles, then, has exactly the required equipment for playing
out the other, and in fact in regard to one stigma or another is likely to have
developed some experience in doing so.
Most important of all, the very notion of shameful differences
assumes a similarity in regard to crucial beliefs, those regarding
identity. (130-131)
Stigma and Reality (135)
Until now it has been argued that a central role
should be given to discrepancies between ritual and actual social
identity. Tension management and
information management have been stressed - how the stigmatized individual can
present to others a precarious self, subject to abuse and discrediting. But to leave it at this creates a biased
perspective, imputing solid reality to what is much shakier than that. The stigmatized and the normal are part of
each other; if one can prove vulnerable, it must be expected that the other
can, too. For in imputing identities to
individuals, discreditable or not, the wider social setting and its inhabitants
have in a way compromised themselves; they have set themselves up to be proven
the fool. (135)
In conclusion, may I repeat that stigma involves
not so much a set of concrete individuals who can be separated into two piles,
the stigmatized and the normal, as a pervasive two-role social process in which
every individual participates in both roles, at least in some connection and in
some phases of life. The normal and the
stigmatized are not persons but rather perspectives. These are generated in social situations
during mixed contacts by virtue of the unrealized norms that are likely to play
upon the encounter. The lifelong
attributes of a particular individual may cause him to be type-cast; he may
have to play the stigmatized role in almost all of his social situations,
making it natural to refer to him, as I have done, as a stigmatized person whose
life-situation places him in opposition to normals. However, his particular stigmatizing
attributes do not determine the nature of the two roles, normal and
stigmatized, merely the frequency of his playing a particular one of them. And since interaction roles are involved, not
concrete individuals, it should come as no surprise that in many cases he who
is stigmatized in one regard nicely exhibits all the normal prejudices held
toward those who are stigmatized in another regard. (137-138)
5. Deviations and Deviance (140)
Once the dynamics of shameful differentness
are seen as a general feature of social life, one can go on to look at the
relation of their study of neighboring matters associated with the term
“deviance” - a currently fashionable word that has been somewhat avoided here
until now, in spite of the convenience of the label. (140)
Starting with the very general notion of a group
of individuals who share some values and adhere to a set of social norms
regarding conduct and regarding personal attributes, one can refer to any
individual member who does not adhere to the norms as a deviator, and to his
peculiarity as a deviation. I do not
think all deviators have enough in common to warrant a special analysis; they
differ in many more ways than they are similar, in part because of the thorough
difference, due to size, of groups in which deviations can occur. One can, however, subdivide the area into
smaller plots, some of which might be worth cultivating. (140-141)
The village idiot, the small-town drunk, and the
platoon clown are traditional examples; the fraternity frat boy is
another. One would expect to find only
one of such persons to a group, since one is all that is needed, further
instances merely adding to the burden of the community. He might be called an in-group deviant
to remind one that he is deviant relative to a concrete group, not merely
norms, and that his intensive if ambivalent inclusion in the group
distinguishes him from another well-known type of deviator - the group isolate
who is constantly in social situations with the group but is not one of their
own. (142)
Those who come together into a sub-community or
milieu may be called social deviants, and their corporate life a deviant
community. They constitute a special
type, but only one type, of deviator.
(143)
In theory, a deviant community could come to
perform for society at large something of the same functions performed by an
in-group deviant for his group, but while this is thinkable, no
one yet seems to have demonstrated the case.
The problem is that the large area from which recruits to a deviant
community are drawn is not itself as clearly a system, an entity, with needs
and functions, as is a small face-to-face group (145).
Now it is apparent that in-group deviants, social
deviants, minority members, and lower class persons are all likely on occasion
to find themselves functioning as stigmatized
individuals, unsure of the reception awaiting them in face-to-face interaction
and deeply involved in the various responses to this plight. This will be so if for no other reason than
that almost all adults have to have some dealings with service organizations,
both commercial and civil, where courteous, uniform treatment is supposed to
prevail based on nothing more restrictive than citizenship, but where
opportunity will arise for concern about invidious expressive valuations based
on a virtual middle class ideal. (146)
It should be apparent, however, that a full
consideration of any one of these four categories leads beyond, and away from,
what is necessary to consider in the analysis of stigma. For example, there are deviant communities
whose members, especially when away from their milieux, are not particularly
concerned about their social acceptance, and therefore can hardly be analyzed
by reference to stigma management; an instance would be certain outdoor milieux
on the warm beaches of America where can be found those aging young people who
are not ready to become contaminated by work and who voluntarily devote
themselves to various forms of riding the waves. Nor should it be forgotten that apart from
the four categories mentioned, there are some disadvantaged persons who are not
stigmatized at all, for example, someone married to a mean and selfish mate, or
someone who is not well off and must raise four children, or someone whose
physical handicap (for example, a mild hearing disability) has interfered with
his life, even though everyone including himself, remains unaware that he has a
physical disability. (146)