How does your social class, level of education, gender, race, or ethnicity, ableism, and nation of origin impact the chances you will be considered deviant in your country?

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What is Stigma?
Strange, weird, dangerous, perverted, a freak – these are all terms used to create distance between groups of people, to create the ‘other’, and they are all markers of stigma. Broadly defined, stigma is a discrediting attribute or mark of disgrace that leads others to see us as untrustworthy, ‘tainted’, or incompetent. Stigma is therefore a socially constructed notion of social acceptance based upon identity and association.
The first sociologist to explore this concept was Émile Durkheim who, in 1895, noted how deviance and criminality are violations of social norms and thereby concepts created by society (Durkheim 1895). Erving Goffman’s 1963 work Stigma: Notes On The Management Of Spoiled Identity, marked the most influential exploration of the concept. His definition, incorporating and refining the work of his predecessors, is “the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance” under three distinct identity-altering grounds (Goffman 1963: 9). Goffman’s work has strongly influenced today’s conceptions of stigma, categories of stigma, its use, and the various management techniques stigmatized individuals respond with.
The three distinct types of stigma outlined by Goffman in the first chapter of his text are:
“abominations of the body” (i.e. physical: genetic deformities, scars, etc.)
“blemishes of individual character” (i.e. generalized bad character: unnatural passions, alcoholism, etc.)
“tribal” (i.e. group affiliation: race, nationality, religion, etc.)
In his 1963 work Goffman further categorizes stigma variation by four criteria that can affect the perceived level of deviance or depravity:
visibility (i.e. discernable by others)
publicity (i.e. already known by others)
obtrusiveness (i.e. affecting social interaction)
relevance (i.e. situational)
These variations are not mutually exclusive and often overlap due to differing levels of perceived depravity, an individual’s choice, and external factors. A famous example is the stigmatization of sufferers of HIV/AIDS who are differentiated from normative society on all three levels: illness, the choice to engage in perceived “dangerous” sex (often assumed homosexual sex), and the assumed connection with homosexuals, greatly feared and stigmatized in their own right, especially during the moral panic surrounding HIV/AIDS of the 1980s and ‘90s (Tomaszewski 2012). Another example is the stigma surrounding depression or other ‘subtle’ forms of mental illness which are so often brushed off as a stigma of character but due to the biological origins of the illnesses, could also be assigned physical stigma. Stigma can be degrading, demoralizing, and even lead to violence, yet as the Bring Change 2 Mind group says “We can overcome stigma.” Overcoming stigma around mental illness could have a remarkable impact on the number of people who seek help instead of hiding what they are going through. Due to this, there are ad campaigns in an attempt to end the stigma around mental illness.

The “Normalization” of deviance is a phrase originally developed by Diane Vaughan, a sociologist who was reviewing the Challenger disaster of 1986. She believed that the root cause of this disaster was related to the “repeated choice of NASA officials to fly the space shuttle despite a dangerous design flaw with the O-rings” (Price & Williams, 2018, p. 1). She used the phrase to explain a phenomenon that occurred when people within an organization become so insensitive to deviant practice that it no longer felt wrong.
Emily Petruzzellli, in a 2020 Editorial for AIChE, wrote about the normalization of deviance in the time of COVID-19. I think this is a really good modern-day example and highly recommend this short read. Editorial: Normalization of Deviance in the time of COVID-19

Answer these questions

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1. Have you ever been labeled deviant? Why or why not?