Resituating Erving Goffman: From Stigma Power to Black Power

Abstract

This paper offers a critical re-reading of the understanding of stigma forged by the North American sociologist Erving Goffman in his influential Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity (1963). One of the most widely read and cited sociologists in history, Goffman was already famous when Stigma was published in 1963. His previous books were bestsellers and Stigma alone has sold an astonishing 800,000 copies in the fifty years since its publication. Given its considerable influence, it is surprising how little sustained engagement there has been with the historicity of Goffman's account. This paper resituates Goffman's conceptualisation of stigma within the historical context of Jim Crow and the Black freedom struggles that were shaking "the social interaction order" to its foundations at the very moment he crafted his account. It is the contention of this paper that these explosive political movements against the 'humiliations of racial discrimination' invite revision of Goffman's decidedly apolitical account of stigma (Robinson, 2000, p. 318). This historical revision of Goffman's stigma concept builds on an existing body of critical work on 'the relationship between race, segregation and the epistemology of sociology within the United States' (Bhambra, 2014). Throughout, it reads Goffman's Stigma through the lens of "Black Sociology", a field of knowledge that here designates not only formal sociological scholarship, but political manifestos, journalism, creative writing, oral histories and memoirs. It is the argument of this paper that placing Goffman's concept of stigma into critical dialogue with Black epistemologies of stigma allows for a timely reconceptualisation of stigma as governmental technologies of de-humanisation that have long been collectively resisted from below.

Local food hubs in deprived areas: de-stigmatising food poverty?

“…Such approaches appear to maintain an individual-based focus, through which stigma constitutes the property or the characteristic of an individual, or a perspective generated in social contexts that then needs to be managed by 'the stigmatised' through identity management and concealment (see Goffman, 1986in Tyler, 2018. Such aproaches ignore the structural conditions and relations of power that may (re)produce conditions of discrimination and help maintain stigma as a form of 'social control' (Parker and Aggleton, 2003;Hannem and Brucket, 2012).…”

The Black Criminal Other as an Object of Social Control

“…Again, for Stephen above, it is not his criminal behaviour that initiated his police interactions, surveillance, and/or overpolicing, but rather his proximity to high ethnic heterogeneous communities. Close proximity to police-defined and memoried problem areas-to be resident or associated within black and brown spaces-blemishes and contaminates the self, cyclically affirming to the police the imposed identifier of the 'risked' (Tyler 2018;Williams 2017). Gang-branding and being matrixed contemporaneously serves to amplify and legitimise the practice of empirically producing and responding to risks, which whilst racialised, is now algorithmically hardwired and concealed into CJ practices and processes.…”

Theoretical Reductionism: Forcing a Covering Law Doctrine of Behavioral Psychology on the Sociology of Everyday Communication and Interaction

“…It is a little social system with its own boundary-maintaining tendencies. (Goffman, 1967, p. 113) Erving Goffman (1922Goffman ( -1982 was one of the most cited (Tyler, 2018;Pettit, 2011) and "influential American sociologists of the twentieth century" (Fine & Manning, 2003, p. 34). Born in Canadian and influenced by George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer, he is best known for his social action rituals, "dramaturgical" approach, and "interaction orders" of face-to-face encounters in our heterogeneous world where different settings call for different forms of communication and activity, rather like a theater performance (Leeds-Hurwitz, 2017).…”

“…Goffman's theoretical model continues to be the analytical lens used by scholars from different disciplines, most notably in the fields of political movements (Tyler, 2018), law school (Bliss, 2017), classical ballet (Whiteside & Kelly, 2016), gambling (Shalin, 2016), horse training (Dellwing, 2016), communications and politics (Brown, 2010;Kravel-Tovi, 2012), nursing, hospitals and health care (Capps, 2016;Hays & Weinert, 2006;O'Brien, Payne, Nolan & Ingleton, 2010;Oliver, Porock & Oliver, 2006), organizational deviance (Jensen & Sandstrom, 2015) and psychoanalysis (Marcus, 2010). When life is viewed as a theatre, as it was by Goffman, the average person can find more meaning and live a better life when he/she can be expressive and impress others (Marcus, 2010, p. 758).…”