Book summary “Stigma”: summary

Introduction

You often feel the silent weight of judgment when you fail to meet unwritten social expectations. Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. When your attributes fall short of these normative demands, you possess a spoiled identity that disrupts smooth social interaction.

Stigma is a universal two-role social process where individuals manage spoiled identities through information control, passing, and covering.

Erving Goffman examines this sociological dynamic through four major structural dimensions. You will first explore how normative expectations clash with actual identities during mixed contacts. The text then details how discreditable individuals manage personal identity through information control. You will proceed to investigate group alignments and ego identity before studying stigma as a universal interaction perspective.

Consider these questions as you read:

• How do normals and stigmatized individuals navigate social encounters?
• What mechanisms allow you to conceal discrediting information?
• How does group alignment shape your self-conception?

1. Stigma and Social Identity

Society establishes categories and attributes expected of individuals in specific settings. Strangers are anticipated to fit these routines based on first appearances, creating a virtual social identity. When an attribute appears that makes the person of a less desirable kind, it constitutes a stigma, marking a discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity.

Normative expectations create virtual social identities that clash with actual identities when a stigma is revealed, forcing individuals into mixed contacts and moral careers.

The term stigma conceals whether you assume your differentness is already known or evident on the spot, versus assuming it is neither known nor immediately perceivable. This divides situations into the plight of the discredited and the plight of the discreditable.

Virtual and Actual Social Identity

Goffman classifies stigmas into three grossly different categories based on their origin and the nature of the attribute:

• abominations of the body, which include physical deformities;
• blemishes of individual character, perceived as weak will or unnatural passions inferred from a record of disorder or addiction;
• tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion transmitted through lineages.

When normals and stigmatized individuals share a social situation, uncertainty arises regarding identification, acceptance, and potential invasions of privacy. Both sides experience heightened awareness, leading to defensive behaviors such as cowering or bravado, and visible uneasiness marked by guarded references and artificial levity.

A professional criminal describes being patronized by straight people who express amazement that he reads authors like Simone de Beauvoir.

The Own and the Wise

You often seek support from those who share your exact stigma, forming specialized groups, networks, or communities. Sympathetic others who share the same stigma provide instruction, moral support, and a circle of lament where the mask of accommodative adjustment can drop. While full membership rarely forms a single unified group with collective action, category members tend to form small social groups and utilize representatives or publications to voice their ideology.

Illiterate individuals interacting among themselves shift from unexpressive persons in the larger society to expressive and understanding participants within their own group.

Normal persons who are intimately privy to the secret life of the stigmatized and sympathetic with it are accorded courtesy membership as the wise. The wise are marginal normals before whom you feel no shame or need for self-control. Their wiseness can stem from working in establishments catering to the stigmatized or from structural social relationships that cause them to share the discredit, such as being the relative of an ex-con.

A twelve-year-old girl writing to Ann Landers describes being excluded from social activities because her father is an ex-convict.

Moral Career Patterns

You experience a similar moral career characterized by learning phases regarding your plight and shifts in identity beliefs. The moral career involves learning the normal standards while discovering your own deficiency. Patterns vary depending on whether the stigma is inborn, protected initially by a domestic capsule before facing public exposure, acquired late in life, or initially socialized in an alien community.

A woman who contracted polio at age twenty-four describes the sudden shock of becoming a stranger to herself and facing a double life.

2. Information Control and Personal Identity

Stigmatized persons are divided into the discredited, whose failing is immediately apparent, and the discreditable, whose failing is not known or perceivable beforehand. While the discredited person must manage the tension generated during social contacts where their difference is known, the discreditable person faces the second main possibility: managing information about their failing through concealment and passing.

Discreditable individuals use social information, passing strategies, and covering techniques to manage personal identity and avoid exposure.

While a mental patient in the hospital is treated as insane, an ex-mental patient faces unwitting acceptance by prejudiced individuals who assume they are interacting with a mentally untainted person. Information about abiding personal characteristics conveyed through bodily expression in the presence of receivers is called social information, transmitted via symbols. Social information uses symbols which can be prestige symbols establishing claims to prestige, stigma symbols drawing attention to debasing identity discrepancies, or disidentifiers throwing doubt on virtual identity claims.

The shaved head of female collaborators in World War II served as a stigma symbol, while horn-rimmed glasses worn by illiterates served as disidentifiers to emulate intellectuals or jazz musicians. America saw the introduction of the Social Security Act in 1935, ensuring unique registration numbers for almost every employee.

The visibility of a stigma must be carefully distinguished from its known-about-ness, obtrusiveness, perceived focus, and the decoding capacity of the audience. Although visibility relates to perceptibility, a highly visible stigma may still be disattended if it is not obtrusive, while other defects like speech impediments constantly interrupt interaction. Furthermore, an audience must possess the specific decoding capacity to recognize certain signs.

A physician walking down the street can immediately spot Hutchinson's signs indicating syphilis, whereas medically blind bystanders see nothing. Personal identity relies on positive marks or identity pegs combined with a unique life history record to differentiate an individual from everyone else. Organized societies use identity pegs such as photographs, fingerprints, birth certificates, and names to attach dossiers and continuous social records to individuals, forming a structured role in social organization.

The Tuareg of West Africa cover their faces, leaving only a slit to see through, replacing facial identity pegs with body appearance and physical style. An individual is anchored as an object for biography, possessing a single continuous life line that contrasts with the multiplicity of their social roles. Informational connectedness measures how closely related important social facts about a person are, so that knowing one fact increases the likelihood of knowing another. Breaches in personal identity, such as name changes, create discontinuities in this biographical record.

Chorus girls in theatrical settings change their names frequently to accord with popularity, superstitions, or to avoid paying union dues. The social world divides others into the knowing and unknowing, relying on cognitive recognition to place individuals and social recognition to exchange communication ceremonies. Cognitive recognition is the perceptual act of placing an individual's identity, whereas social recognition involves reciprocal communication exchanges like nods and greetings among personal acquaintances.

In British criminal circles, a specialized observer called a corner-man takes a post near illicit businesses to recognize the personal identities of passersby and warn of suspicious characters. Discreditable individuals use passing strategies, spatial partitioning, and information control to maintain single or double lives and avoid exposure. Passers navigate forbidden, civil, and back places while guarding against direct exposure, blackmail, and inadvertent disclosure. They may live single double lives or double double lives where multiple circles remain entirely unaware of each other.

A call girl running into her cousins at a party who are with other call girls experiences the precariousness of managing simultaneous social circles. Covering is an adaptive technique where individuals admit their stigma but make great efforts to reduce tension and restrict the display of their failings. While passing conceals the stigma entirely, covering ensures that a known or apparent stigma does not loom large in interaction. Individuals restrict obtrusive behaviors, manage conversational lulls, and relearn motor proprieties to maintain unconcern.

A hard of hearing woman named Frances utilized elaborate techniques during dinner lulls, such as sitting next to someone with a strong voice or asking questions whose answers she already knew. You can apply specific techniques when covering a known failing in social settings:

• Sit next to someone with a strong voice at dinner parties.
• Choke, cough, or get hiccups if someone asks a direct question.
• Take hold of the conversation yourself or ask someone to tell a story you have already heard.

3. Group Alignment and Ego Identity

Social and personal identity concern other people. They can exist before birth or after death. Ego identity is a reflexive, subjective matter felt by you. You construct this felt identity using the same raw materials that others use to identify you socially. You still exercise individual liberties in shaping it.

When a criminal uses an alias, they detach themselves from their personal identity. Retaining original initials shows an indulgence of ego identity.

Ego identity and group alignments involve navigating deep ambivalence, professional presentations, and opposing political strategies.

In-Group Stratification

Faced with failing identity standards, stigmatized individuals experience intense ambivalence. You tend to distance yourself from visibly stigmatized peers by adopting the exact prejudices held by normals. This oscillation of identification is sharply marked in choices of affiliation, friends, and spouses.

Hard of hearing individuals stoutly view themselves as anything but deaf. Those with defective vision refuse to see themselves as blind.

Professional Presentations

Professionals provide codes of conduct that warn stigmatized individuals against minstrelization and normification. In minstrelization, you ingratiatingly act out bad qualities before normals like a clown. In normification, you excessively try to prove you are a nice person despite appearances. Adherents to professional codes gain authenticity, while failure leads to self-delusion.

An educated dwarf woman who stood four feet tall carefully played the part of the court fool in front of strangers to avoid frightening them. She kept her true intelligent and lonely self hidden for private spaces.

You can follow specific professional presentations in mixed social situations:

• Conceal the stigma from mere acquaintances while feeling secure enough to reveal it to spouses, close friends, and employers.
• Cultivate a cheerful, outgoing manner and avoid bitterness, resentment, or self-pity.
• Use acquired skills in mixed social situations to tactfully help normals act nicely and reduce tension.

In-Group and Out-Group Alignments

Proponents of in-group alignment argue that your real group is the category of persons sharing the same deprivations. Turning toward this group makes you loyal and authentic, while turning away makes you craven. Extreme militancy can politicize life and reinforce the public image of differentness. Second generation Jews aggressively interlard their speech with Jewish idiom and accent. Militant gay individuals are patriotically swish in public places.

Adherents to the out-group psychiatric line advise you to cultivate maturity and good personal adjustment. You are expected to tactfully manage mixed social situations, break the ice, and accept unsolicited help gracefully. An amputee described making smoking jokes with a pack of cigarettes and hooks to serve as an icebreaker and make normals comfortable.

You can apply specific rules from the out-group line in daily interactions:

• Do not answer slights, snubs, or untactful remarks in kind; take no notice or use sympathetic re-education.
• Break the ice by referring to one's failing with detachment, levity, or matter-of-factness.
• Tacitly accept unsolicited offers of interest, sympathy, and help to establish a foothold for contact.

4. The Self and Deviations

Identity norms cover static status attributes and minor interaction etiquette. In American society, multiple standards combine to define a narrow ideal against which almost every male fails in some way at various points in life, casting a shadow on daily encounters.

A wide array of identity norms creates a societal value system against which almost everyone falls short, generating widespread feelings of unworthiness.

An American male ideal is described as a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, with a recent record in sports.

Because the stigmatized and normals share standard mental equipment, individuals can play both roles. When individuals suddenly shift from normal to stigmatized or vice versa, they rapidly adopt the corresponding strategies and interaction patterns, proving that the normal and the deviant are parts of the same complex.

Stigma management is a general societal feature, and the stigmatized and the normal share the exact same mental make-up and capabilities.

Social experiments where normal subjects temporarily take on partial deafness show them spontaneously manifesting the reactions and devices of the actually handicapped.

The Normal Deviant

Lifelong attributes may cause an individual to be type-cast into playing the stigmatized role frequently, but the attributes do not determine the nature of the roles themselves. The normal and stigmatized are interaction perspectives generated in mixed contacts based on unrealized identity norms.

An individual stigmatized in one regard nicely exhibits all the normal prejudices held toward those who are stigmatized in another regard.

While tension and information management are crucial, normals are also vulnerable to error. Stigmatized individuals frequently take pleasure in passing, tricking normals into making foolish assumptions, or deploying preposterous explanations and cold stares to protect their privacy.

A one-legged girl developed a game called Ham and Legs, answering stranger inquiries with preposterous fabrications like claiming a loan company was holding her leg for security.

You can apply specific strategies to protect privacy and handle stranger inquiries in public spaces:

• Deploy stock humorous or preposterous explanations to terminate unwanted stranger inquiries about a disability.
• Use a cold stare as a standard defense to anesthetize against intrusive stranger behavior in public spaces.

Stigma and Reality

Goffman notes that people who deviate from group norms differ in more ways than they are similar, largely because of the varying sizes and structures of the groups in which these deviations occur. Grouping all norm violators together creates a false unity born of academic categorization rather than inherent shared traits.

Confirmed high positions in small, close-knit groups can grant a license to deviate because the group's conception of the individual withstands the peculiarity. Similarly, a person defined as physically sick can temporarily fail performance standards without it reflecting poorly on their character or relation to the group, provided they handle the sick status properly.

An in-group deviant is someone in a concrete group who deviates in deed or attributes and comes to play a special role, serving as a focal point that welds others into a participating circle while being denied full respect. They are distinct from a group isolate because they are intensively and ambivalently included within the circle where full biographical information about them is widespread.

Traditional examples of in-group deviants include the village idiot, the small-town drunk, the platoon clown, and the fraternity fat boy.

Deviants and Deviations

When shifting the system of reference from small family-like groups to larger systems, roles appear whose performers are out of step with everyday morality. For instance, ministers or priests are obligated to live a righteous life far more intensely than normal, while law officers must make a daily routine out of other people's infractions.

Disaffiliates act irregularly toward basic institutions like the family, age-grade systems, gender role divisions, legitimate full-time employment, and racial segregation. Depending on whether they act alone, focus collectively within a place, or form a sub-community, they are categorized as eccentrics, cultists, or social deviants.

Individuals perceived as failing to use approved runways for social advancement and showing open disrespect for authority constitute the core of the field of deviancy. Their corporate communities provide a haven of self-defense where they can claim equal or superior worth to normals and recruit restless individuals.

Prostitutes, drug addicts, delinquents, criminals, jazz musicians, bohemians, gypsies, carnival workers, hobos, winos, show people, full-time gamblers, beach dwellers, homosexuals, and the urban unrepentant poor.

Members of these four categories often find themselves unsure of their reception in face-to-face interactions, particularly within civil and commercial service organizations where universal citizenship is supposed to prevail, but invidious middle-class valuations operate.

Some deviant communities, such as beach milieux where young people avoid work to ride waves, are not particularly concerned about social acceptance when away from their milieux. Additionally, many disadvantaged persons—such as those married to selfish mates, burdened with raising 4 children, or possessing mild, unrecognized physical handicaps—are entirely unstigmatized.

A person whose mild hearing disability has interfered with their life even though everyone, including themselves, remains unaware of the physical disability.

By grouping stigmatized persons together based on shared situational commonalities, Goffman extracts a coherent analytical perspective from traditional fields like criminology, race relations, and social pathology. Recognizing what these areas share allows researchers to build rigorous analytical perspectives rather than restricting interest to a single substantive area.

10 Key Ideas

1. Normative expectations create virtual social identities that clash with actual identities when a stigma is revealed, forcing individuals into mixed contacts and moral careers.
2. Goffman classifies stigmas into abominations of the body, blemishes of individual character, and tribal stigmas of race, nation, and religion.
3. When normals and stigmatized individuals share a social situation, uncertainty arises regarding identification, acceptance, and potential invasions of privacy.
4. Normal persons who are intimately privy to the secret life of the stigmatized and sympathetic with it are accorded courtesy membership as the wise.
5. Individuals experience a similar moral career characterized by learning phases regarding their plight and shifts in identity beliefs.
6. Discreditable individuals use social information, passing strategies, and covering techniques to manage personal identity and avoid exposure.
7. Covering is an adaptive technique where individuals admit their stigma but make great efforts to reduce tension and restrict the display of their failings.
8. Professionals provide codes of conduct that warn stigmatized individuals against minstrelization, where they act out bad qualities like a clown, and normification.
9. The normal and stigmatized are interaction perspectives generated in mixed contacts based on unrealized identity norms, proving that both roles share the same mental make-up.
10. By grouping stigmatized persons together based on shared situational commonalities, Goffman extracts a coherent analytical perspective from traditional fields like criminology, race relations, and social pathology.