Erving Goffman--Stigma: Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1978)

Goffman identifies the process through which we determine stigma, a characteristic which he importantly identifies as a relational one:

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.  Social settings establish the categories of persons likely to be encountered there.  The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. (2)

Or, more specifically, “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….stigma, then, is really a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype” (2). [1] Observing that “the person with stigma is not quite human” (3), Goffman explains that the our unconscious assumptions lead us to “exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances” (3)—an observation which echoes Butler’s ideas about intelligibility. 

Goffman also echoes Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, noting that stigma reduces a person in the mind from being a “whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (2).  He then turns to the possible reactions of those who are stigmatized, which include trying to correct the stigma, or focusing his attention to mastery of one particular area related to his shortcoming, or, he can “break with what is called reality, and obstinately attempt to employ an unconventional interpretation of the character of his social identity” (6).  Goffman’s focus is what he calls “‘mixed contacts’—the moments when stigmatized and normal are in the same ‘social situation,’ that is, in one another’s immediate physical presence” (8)—and notes that most normals and stigmatized will arrange their lives to minimize such moments of mixed contact.  At such moments, the stigmatized may be unsure how he will be identified and received (9), and may have to work at the impression he is making.  Further, stigmatized people are vulnerable to invasions of privacy, with perfect strangers feeling comfortable starting personal conversations.  On the other hand, “normals” in such situations may find themselves hyperaware of their own reactions, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.

One thing which is interesting to note is that Goffman identifies that “no matter how small and how badly off a particular stigmatized category is, the viewpoint of its members is likely to be given public presentation of some kind.”  The result of this is that “Americans who are stigmatized tend to live in a literarily-defined world” (25).  Additionally, I’m also interested in what Goffman terms “disidentifiers”: “a sign that tends—in fact or hope—to break up an otherwise coherent picture but in this case in a positive direction…not so much establishing a new claim as throwing severe doubt on the validity of the virtual one” (43)—in other words, markers which allow one to “pass” as a normal, or at least less stigmatized.

Most importantly, Goffman addresses ugliness directly in his discussion of visibility of stigma:

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.  Ugliness, for example, has its initial and prime effect during social situations, threatening the pleasure we might otherwise take in the company of its possessor.  We perceive, however, that his competency in solitary tasks, although of course we may discriminate against him here simply because of the feelings we have about looking at him.  Ugliness, then, is a stigma that is focused on social situations. (49).

This is in contrast to a less visible stigma, such as diabetes, which have “no initial effect on the individual’s qualifications for face-to-face interactions” (49).  While I take Goffman’s point about the immediacy of ugliness’s visibility, I think that (a) ugliness is often used as a marker of characteristics which are not physical (as in, the Lord don’t like ugly, or don’t be ugly); and (b) while ugliness is certainly relational, as Goffman characterizes stigmas to be, I think that it is much more complicated than his characterization as being primarily one of social situations.

Also important to my work is his observation that “although impersonal contacts between strangers are particularly subject to stereotypical responses, as persons come to be on closer terms with each other this categoric approach recedes and gradually sympathy, understanding, and a realistic assessment of personal qualities takes its place” (51).  This observation certainly must be considered in my analysis of Scarlett O’Hara.  This leads Goffman to conclude that “stigma management, then, might be seen as something that pertains mainly to public life” (51)—but again, I think this characterization of “public life, to contact between strangers or mere acquaintances, to one end of a continuum whose other pole is intimacy” (51) should be more nuanced in my consideration.  It further makes me think of the relationship between appearance, how appearance is read, what happens in that intersubjective space between viewer and viewed, and the effect on identity.

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[1] I’m also quite intrigued by the relationship he sets up between the stigmatized and the normal person—what Goffman characterizes as the person he is “normal against” (4)—the use of “against” here is really interesting.

Sigmund Freud--Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)

Freud makes a number of significant and surprisingly progressive points in this work.  Building on and responding to the work of sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Ulrich.  In the first essay, “The Sexual Aberrations,” Freud addresses inversion, fetishes, and other “aberrations.”  Significantly, he observes that sexual inversion varies: while some are only attracted to those of the same sex, others can be attracted to both sexes, and even others engaged in sexual activity with those of the same sex under specific circumstances (location 123).  Some have always had feelings for the same sex, while some can point to specific incidents which acted as a catalyst for these feelings (location 160).  Further, many “inverts” are attracted to very feminine men, for example, which complicates the general understanding of inversion as a woman’s mind trapped in a man’s body.  Importantly, he claims that, “The sexual impulse is probably entirely independent of its object and is not originated by the stimuli proceeding from the object” (location 236). 

In his discussion of sadomasochism, Freud observes that “The sexuality of most men shows a taint of aggression, it is a propensity to subdue, the biological significance of which lies in the necessity of overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by actions other than mere courting” (location 349).  When combined with his earlier characterization of the “conventional reticence and dishonesty of women” (273), the dynamics of heterosexuality as Freud observes them are troubling.  However, it is also significant that Freud identifies that all “normal” sexual behavior contains elements of perversion, and “this universality suffices in itself to prove the inexpediency to prove the opprobrious application of the name perversion” (location 386).  Further, it is also significant that Freud wishes to “find out how much of the biology of the sexual life of man can be discovered by means of psychological investigation” (location 114), instead of trying to find coincidences of sexual characteristics with physical markers, as so many before him tried to do.  He also seems to be arguing for situational sexuality, as he says that there are very few people who truly prefer children or animals sexually to adults, but that most who prey upon the young or engage in bestiality do so out of cowardliness or lack of other partners (especially in the case of animals). Freud also argues for the existence of sexual urges from birth—not from puberty—and thus claims that sexual perversions can have their roots in childhood development and experience.

Scott Romine--The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction

Evoking the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Romine examines “the ‘real’/‘South’: a set of anxious, transient, even artificial intersections, sutures, or common surfaces between two concepts that are themselves remarkably fluid” (2-3).  He argues that “the South’s relatively abrupt entrance into modernity and its aftermath has generated a kind of time-space compression compression, if you will, wherein the South’s cultural and economic ‘backwardness’ relative to the U.S. nation has, ironically enough, placed it in the avant-garde of contemporary poetics” (4).  I’m fascinated by his reading of the Agrarians, who were “not too late for a South already corrupted by a capitalized and industrialized economy, but too early for a post-industrial economy wherein the flexible accumulation of capital would drive, and be driven by, the flexible accumulation of culture” (6).  Observing more recent accounts of the (post)South, Romine looks at both work by Martyn Bone and Jon Smith’s critique of Bone’s work: “narratives of rupture and continuity support tactical (scholarly) projects of different sorts—for Bone, an account of southern cities as dystopian effects of postnational finance capitalism; for Smith, an account of cities as ‘the best things to happen to the South’—and further, that they do so by suturing southern stories to southern spaces” (7).  In Romine’s consideration, his “own definition of the South, such as it is, would be precisely as a field of suture” (7).  He emphasizes the reproductive, reiterative nature of “the South”—“Post-essentialist accounts of the South (as something like a mere geographical container) characteristically reiterate, or at least depend upon, earlier essentialist accounts of what generated such boundaries in the first place” (14).

In his focus on narrative, Romine claims that “Narratives tell of, present, and portray desire even as they use and embody it, and in this doubling lies, I argue, narrative’s distinctive capacity to account, in the broadest sense, for desire’s operations as it is decoded, cut loose from more regulated forms of territoriality, and then reattached more tenuously and flexibly to themed spaces, localities, and artificial territorialities” (24).  Later, he uses this idea of narrative in his definition of culture:

I want to interrogate essentialist productions of the South as they are mapped on a stressed terrain of interlocking and overlapping territorialities, of rapid oscillations  of interpellation and articulation, of similarity and difference.  Instead of a real South, I want to think about the South as Appadurai suggests we should conceptualize culture: in a nonsubstantive way—that is, less a set of properties attached to a location (and still less a coherent “way of life” through which a coherent southern identity is maintained) than a flexible and loosely spatialized archive of “materials” (historical, cultural, material) differently mobilized in acts of situated and articulated difference, multiply embedded in what Kreyling calls narratives of identity (105)

in “the pragmatics (as opposed to the metaphysics) of authenticity” (106).  Ultimately, Romine argues that “we are still using regional culture as a tool to organize spaces, to build environments, and to tell stories,” and it is narratives which “strive to secure identities, cultures, and their locations as real, not fake, continuous, not contingent” (229).  The South is still a viable idea.

Monique Wittig--The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992)

In what Wittig characterizes as a materialist lesbian approach to heterosexuality, she “describe[s] heterosexuality not as an institution but as a political regime which rests on the submission and the appropriation of women,” a regime from which there is no escape (xiiv).  The only response to such an entrenched regime is nothing short of the political, philosophical, and symbol destruction of the categories of “men” and “women” (xiiv-xiv).  By defining “woman” in political terms, Wittig wishes to dissociate “‘women’ (the class within which we fight) and ‘woman,’ the myth” (15), and subsequently “suppress men as a class…[through] a political struggle” (15).  To Wittig, the primary failing of Marxism was its failure to see individual subjects historically situated: “It is we who must undertake the task of defining the individual subject in materialist terms” (19).  Further, in her indictment of (French) psychoanalytic theory, she importantly observes that in the midst of such theoretical work, “we forget the material (physical) violence that they directly do to the oppressed people” (25).  Wittig’s example of such violence (in her 1980 essay) is that of pornography, an analysis which has been addressed in much more complex ways than how she addresses it: to Wittig, all pornography demonstrates the oppression of women by men within a heterosexual economy.  However, it is within her discussion of pornography that she first uses the phrase “the straight mind,” which “develops a totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all the subjective phenomena at the same time…[which has a] tendency to immediately universalize its production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true to all societies, all epochs, all individuals” (27).

Important to my work is her discussion of the foundation of the marriage economy: “The compulsory reproduction of the ‘species’ by women is the system of exploitation on which heterosexuality is economically based” (6).  In her discussion of the necessity of problematizing any ideas of the categories of man and woman as natural, she states that “what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by the oppressor: the ‘myth of woman,’ plus its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of women” (11).  As the lesbian does not fit into the marriage economy, Wittig sees the lesbian as rejecting the role of women.  Borrowing a term from Prous, Wittig says, “The lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society….The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual…is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man” (13).

Also intriguing is her discussion of “feminine writing,” a French feminist concept of which Wittig is quite critical: “What is this ‘feminine’ in ‘feminine writing’?  It stands for Woman, thus merging a practice with a myth, the myth of Woman” (59).  But as she does with the categories of men, women, and lesbian, as well as Marxist, psychoanalytic, and linguistic perspectives, she is not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Rather, she identifies what is useful about each of these perspectives and fills her arsenal with their tools.

Jonathan Ned Katz--The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995)

Katz’s text builds on the gay studies movement of the 1970s, especially works by Joseph Epstein and Foucault.  After his work on recovering a history of homosexuality, in this text he moves on to challenge three “arguments [about] our idea of an age-old heterosexuality: (1) a procreate-or-perish imperative makes heterosexuality a necessity everlasting; (2) all societies recognize basic distinctions between human females and males, girls and boys, women and men—those biological and cultural differences are the source of an immortal sexuality that is hetero; (3) the bodily pleasure generated by female and male conjunctions remains the unchanging basis of an eternal heterosexuality” (14).  He goes on to claim that “heterosexuality is not identical to the reproductive intercourse of the sexes; heterosexuality is not the same as the sex distinctions and gender differences; heterosexuality does not equal the eroticism of women and men.  Heterosexuality, I argue, signifies one particular historical arrangement of the sexes and their pleasures” (14).  Katz also distinguishes between “sexual reproduction, sex difference, and sexual pleasure,” noting that they “have been produced and combined in different social systems in radically different ways” (14).  Katz also acknowledges not only what he has gained from recent feminist approaches to history, especially the awareness of how gender, race, and status have influenced the narratives which have been told and assumptions which have been made about heterosexuality.

He begins with the work of doctors like Krafft-Ebing at the turn of the century, who took a medical approach to sexuality.  It was at this point (in the 1890s) that the idea that the sexual instinct was identified as a procreative desire was being challenged by “a new different-sex pleasure ethic” (19).  In his discussion of Kraff-Ebing, he points out that “the term ‘contrary sexual feeling’ presupposed the existence of a non-contrary ‘sexual feeling,’ the term ‘sexual inversion’ presupposed a noninverted sexual desire. From the start of this medicalizing, ‘contrary’ and ‘inverted’ sexuality were problematized, [while] ‘sexual feeling’ was taken for granted” (55).  After Krafft-Ebing comes Freud, who put pleasure—rather than reproduction—at the center of human sexual feeling and behavior.  Importantly, Freud’s ideas of the libido, drives, instincts, and impulses demonstrate a “desire for psychic satisfaction experienced in the flesh” (61).  I think this may be a very important point in terms of embodiment themes in literature.  However, Katz also notes that “Freud innovatively proposes the original and complete independence of erotic desire and erotic object” (61)—an important innovation, but one which requires careful consideration, because it’s easy to fall into a solipsistic way of thinking, failing to taking concepts such as intersubjectivity into account.

After discussing the solidification of the other-sex pleasure centrality to twentieth-century sexuality and its role in cementing heterosexuality as the normative mode (as well as the change in understanding of heterosexuality from its existence as a medical term meaning morbid attachment to nonprocreative sexuality to its meaning today, Katz turns to the feminist contribution to the critiquing and problematizing of heterosexuality, observing that much feminist work (looking at specifically at liberal and radical feminist commentaries from 1963 and 1975) “critically probe not only male supremacy but the social arrangement of heterosexuality” (113).  While Katz is a fan of second wave feminist critiques of heterosexuality, he observes that many of these critics (such as Monique Wittig, to name only one) “fall[] prey to the equation of heterosexuality with reproduction,” failing to see that pleasure-oriented, Freudian heterosexuality is actually at the heart of the heterosexual social organization of which they otherwise provide incisive critiques (157).  Ultimately, Katz says that,

I don’t think that the invention of the word heterosexual, and the concept, created a different-sex erotic.  I do think that the doctors’ appropriation of the word and idea of heterosexuality newly and publicly legitimated the previously existing but officially condemned different-sex eroticism of the middle class.  The word heterosexual, and the concept, then helped to re-create this sexed eroticism as, specifically, “heterosexual” within a new, specifically “heterosexual” society. (181).

Katz’s vision of modern-day heterosexuality is one that ultimately emerged out changing view of sexuality from a nineteenth century understanding of sexual desire as based in procreation to one (and one specifically attributed to a rising American middle class with falling birth rates and rising divorce rates) which had pleasure at its center.  Katz goes even further in his conclusion, claiming that “Heterosexual and homosexual refer to a historically specific system of domination—of socially unequal  sexes and eroticisms” (189).  As “feminists have recently shown us that sexual anatomy does not determine  our gender destinies…neither does biology determine our erotic fates” (190).refer to a historically specific system of domination—of socially unequal  sexes and eroticisms” (189).  As “feminists have recently shown us that sexual anatomy does not determine  our gender destinies…neither does biology determine our erotic fates” (190).

Ralph Ellison-Invisible Man (1952)

This novel follows an unnamed (though he goes by two different names over the course of the novel) narrator from his education at an uplift school for African Americans to his work for civil rights in Harlem.  It’s a novel of anger and violence which doesn’t shirk from illustrating not only horrors of racism but also the shortcomings of black nationalism and Marxism and the legacy of leaders such as Booker T. Washington.  The novel opens with a sickeningly violent scene in which the narrator is forced to fight blindfolded with other black men for the amusement of the rich white men who fund his education.  The black men are tortured by the white men with the promise of money and prestige, a theme which undergirds much of the book.  After the narrator’s failure to properly entertain one of the white patrons of his southern school, he goes north in search of the freedom which the myth of the north promises.  Once there, he is recruited by the Brotherhood, an organization run by whites which is dedicated to racial uplift.  Like he was at school, the narrator is seduced by promises of success which turn out to be empty, as any real progress he is able to make are thwarted by the Brotherhood’s claims of larger goals.  The novel ends with the narrator abandoned by the Brotherhood, attacked by black nationalists, and literally living under ground as an invisible man.

Richard Gray--Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (2000)

Gray addresses the questions of southern regionalism in literature by looking at “writers who, for very different reasons, have found their involvement with the American South particularly problematical” (ix).  Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, and looking at authors such as Ellen Glasgow, the Agrarians, Erskine Caldwell, Appalachian authors, and contemporary southern writers who address social change such as Lee Smith, Harry Crews, and Barry Hannah (among many others).  He addresses the Agrarian codification of the southern literary canon, noting that Allen Tate in particular “was trying to rewrite literary history from a self-consciously reactive position just as much as, in his social and political essays, he was trying to reinvent the broader history of the West from a stance of equally self-conscious reaction” (97).  He then addresses subsequent canonical Southern criticism texts and examines what has been omitted from the traditions and why.  Throughout, he examines how such authors, most of whom have definite ties to the South (and write about the South) negotiate their vexed relationship to the region, often in terms of their participation in (or lack) of social criticism, awareness of social problems, or the ways in which they address the history of racial violence.

While Cash (among others) identified that “Southern white women of the privileged classes have customarily been associated with the ‘very notion’ of the region…black women were assigned the sexual function: that is, they became those with whom the sexual dimension of experience was habitually and mythically associated” (23).  Echoing Mr. Compson in Absalom, he discusses the paradox that Southern women are considered both bodiless as well as marked by blood, a contradiction which requires a certain kind of repression “when women are transformed into ‘ladies,’ drained of blood and all intimations of corporeal or sexual life, dressed in white and placed on a pedestal” (24).  He invokes Kristeva’s definition of femininity as “that which is marginalized by the patriarchal symbolic order” (quoted page 24), and says that, “To the extent that they are within the order, shielding it from an imagined chaos, they can be seen as precious guardians of the law; to the extent that they are outside, however, in contact with that chaos, they can be seen as creatures of turbulence and darkness—not preventing chaos but partaking of it, even encouraging it to come again” (25).  He then brings up Mary Douglas’s ideas of purity and dirt, noting that while traditional southern white women in literature “have all the insubstantiality that any self-respecting Southern white male…might have expected[,]…at crucial moments, they prove themselves unclean, the blood breaks through….it a blood that reminds us that they are, finally, of the earth, earthly” (25).

His discussion of Mildren Haun’s female characters is interesting: “Haun’s stories describe a community in which women can have strange powers—to put ‘a sure witch sign’ on someone they disapprove of, for instance—but where they remain, in the last analysis, powerless” (294).  Further, “Haun was convinced of the conflicted status of her sex in traditional hill culture.  The women in these stories draw whatever strength they possess, not so much from the concreteness of the natural world as from the vitality of custom; their belief in themselves flows from their tapping into the wellsprings of magic and ritual.  Their powerlessness, however, issues from the same source” (295). 

Gray’s analysis of Harry Crews sees him as the progeny of O’Connor.  “Crews deploys freaks to defamiliarize, to expose what may be concealed by the tyranny of habit and so make us see how remarkable, how truly strange, the supposedly normal can be” (402).  What’s important to me in his discussion of contemporary southern lit such as Crews is his discussion of the “postsouthern”: “these ‘postsouthern’ people live not so much in the stream of history as on its margins from where, like compulsive voyeurs, they watch everything that passes with a glazed sense of uninvolvement.  Their problem, really, is not like that of their predecessors, an excess of narrative (an excess flowing from the conviction that the past is never dead), but rather its absence, the suspicion that no stories or ceremonies apply, that there are no more tales worth telling or parts worth playing” (433).  This really echoes my own idea of the “postmythic” South, one in which we no longer believe in the old stories—but I think my position is a bit more overtly optimistic, as I see the continuation of southern literature as proof that there are new stories to tell.  Of course, it’s dangerous to use the word “optimistic” even in the same paragraph as Harry Crews’s name.

To Gray’s concluding question, “Why does Southern self-fashioning continue?” he cites Welty: “It is a matter of language and communal ritual: the human habit of positioning the self with the help of the word and others—giving a local habitation and a name to things to secure their and our identity, and establishing a connection or kinship with other people that is also an anchorage, a validation of oneself” (504).  Ultimately, southerners are driven “to position themselves with others in their locality, communality of interest or area, and against or apart from others elsewhere” (511).