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Introduction
- University of Ottawa Press
- Chapter
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Ervin Goffman’s seminal book Stigma (1963), published almost half a century ago, has inspired generations of students, researchers, and scholars (including the editors and contributors to this volume) who draw on the conceptual tools as they seek to “make sense” of the social world. In the last decade, we have seen an exciting body of work emerge. Authors build on the insights of those who came before them but strive to overcome the astructural bias of Goffman’s work through nuanced integrated theory, drawing on, for example gender theory (Whiteford and Gonzalez 1995; Gray 2002), Marxism (Bruckert 2002), and Foucault (Hacking 2004). Of course, the significance of Goffman’s slim volume extends well beyond the realm of the academy precisely because stigma is not merely conceptual, theoretical, and analytic in nature. It is deeply personal, and the language of stigma provides an expressive vehicle to speak of dynamic “everyday ” experiences that resonate in and through our lives as we (often simultaneously ) live and negotiate, challenge and embrace, perpetuate and resist, stigma. In this collection, we aspire to a holistic approach that builds on academic representations and everyday experiences. The organization and content of Stigma Revisited: Implications of the Mark speaks to the tensions in our commitment: our obligation as academics and activists to honour everyday lived experiences; our recognition that all social actors (including stigma researchers) are personally implicated as the recipients and perpetuators of stigma; our appreciation that stigma is not only interpersonally realized but also structurally embedded; and our commitment to the academic enterprise characterized by solid research and rigorous analysis. It also speaks to another tension, our Introduction Chris Bruckert and Stacey Hannem 2 Stigma Revisited desire to pay homage to the traditions of the Chicago school and the early sociologists of “deviance” who first questioned the nature and definitions of deviance, problematized dominant social constructions, and validated experiential authority (see Becker 1963; Polsky 1967). At the same time, while grounded in ethnographic and constructionist roots, we also engage with more contemporary debates around epistemology to recognize that academic knowledges are themselves the product of the interaction between the researcher and the researched, each of whom brings a unique life history and perspective to the encounter. Throughout the volume, the narratives of marginalized persons, those who are experts in their own lives, are central. First, the book contains three first person accounts of the everyday realities of stigma by Nicholas Little, “Crazzy” Dave Dessler and Charles Huckelbury. The inclusion of these accounts speaks to our commitment to greater epistemological openness and to exposing the reader to voices that might otherwise not be heard. Stigmatized individuals may not scatter their texts with the words of Foucault and Goffman, but that does not mean they do not have a profound and deeply insightful understanding of stigma. Nor does it mean they cannot speak the truth to power. Indeed, we believe these “raw” narratives , which have not been carefully sliced and diced and served up sandwiched between academic analyses, shed much needed light into the world of the “other.” This brings us to the second distinctive component of the volume. Just who is the other? Researchers who poke and prod are also social actors who judge and are judged. In the prologues that begin each chapter, the authors speak in their own voices and take the reader “behind the facade.” In the process, they invite the reader to see academics as conflicted social actors who struggle to negotiate their own and others’ stigmatic assumptions. The final characteristic of the book is also the heart of the text—careful qualitative research that respectfully attends to the voices of experience, while using the conceptual tools of sociology to make sense of their worlds. We begin with Nicholas Little’s piece “Down, Out, Crazy!” which speaks powerfully not only to stigma but also to the tensions and dialogue that permeate the collection. We then move on to Stacey Hannem’s theoretical discussion of stigma, which draws on the work of Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, and governmentality theorists to develop an integrated theoretical framework that positions us to think through the often-intersecting nature of interpersonal and structural stigmas. This chapter explores the structure/agency debate and the implications of structural limitations for the actions of marginalized persons, and provides a conceptual point of departure from which to understand and position the substantive chapters that follow. The remainder of the volume intersperses “speaking out” narratives and first-person “prologues” by the research contributors...