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3 Autonarrating Transgression THE DEVIANCE CONCEPT, born in the 1920s out of research on urban decay and disorganization, remained a mainstay of the sociological curriculum for decades. But by the 1970s, radicals and Marxists began questioning the concept’s viability (Liazos, 1972; Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973). By the 1990s to the early 2000s, the assault had become something of an avalanche, with some of these challenges, from a leftwing perspective, by inventing a genealogy of the field, arguing that the sociology of deviance had died (Sumner, 1994), while others, adopting a conservative, essentialistic, right-wing stance, asserted that the field had abandoned a moral center, made claims contrary to “natural law,” sustains a toxic, taboo concept, and hence, had “died” (Hendershott, 2002), and still others, claiming that they had evidence to support the charge that attention to deviance had precipitously declined in recent years (Miller, Wright, and Dannels, 2001; Best, 2004). Contrary to some of field’s critics, any investigation of the “death” claim must include a tally of the number of courses on deviance in sociology departments, along with enrollments. I made an inquiry at a dozen and a half programs and found that between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, the number of departments offering the course had more than doubled and the total enrollments in these courses had more than tripled. I also checked the number of articles in the social science literature with “deviance” and “deviant” in the title and found that the peak decade was the 1980s; for book titles, the top decade was the 1970s. None of this adds up to the “death” or “dying” of the sociology of deviance. It is possible that 44 / Chapter 3 the field is less vital, creative, and innovative than was true in the past and that it is less of a fixture in mainstream sociology (though an argument could be made for the increasing irrelevance of mainstream sociology for American society). I would maintain, however, that the potential of the deviance concept has yet to be fully tapped, and indications of its importance is all around us. Perhaps most important is the fact that the field of sociology generally has incorporated many of the most important insights of its subfield, deviance— a case of Robert K. Merton’s “obliteration by incorporation” (1979). We see it in queer theory, postcolonial studies, the sociology of medicine, the study of social movements, criminology, social problems, mass communications, and in the study of moral panics. And above all, we see it in narrative studies, particularly in its investigation of deviance neutralization. The sociology of deviance may have declined as a field within sociology proper, but deviance is an eternal concept, an ineradicable feature of social life, and will always be worth studying from a social science perspective. After all, if the sociology of deviance dies, who’s going to study what is one of the most fundamental processes in human life—what happens when a member of the society violates a consequential social norm? To assert that “deviance” is dead, dying, or declining (Miller, Wright, and Dannels, 2001) is asinine. The “I” and the “Me” George Herbert Mead, an American philosopher, social psychologist, and university professor, developed the distinction between the “I” and the “me.” Though Mead published a substantial number of papers during his lifetime, he never developed a systematic treatise spelling out his central ideas; his most often-cited work, Mind, Self, and Society, was assembled after his death by former students who stitched together their lecture notes from his 1927 and 1930 courses on social psychology, along with manuscripts and notes Mead left behind (1934). The self, argues Mead, is composed of both the “I” and the “me”—they are inseparable—but his “I” refers to the acting self, the “human organism at any moment, but especially at the points at which the organism is launching itself into action” (Blumer, 2004, p. 66). In contrast, the “me” is “that action viewed by the organism from the standpoint of a generalized other” (p. 66)— that is, the self-conscious knowledge of the many evaluating communities relevant to the actor’s behavior. The actor is alive to “their attitudes, knows what they want and what the consequences of any act of his [or hers] will be, and he [or she] has assumed responsibility for the situation” (Mead, 1934, p. 175). In short, “it is the presence of those organized sets of attitudes that constitutes that ‘me’ to which...

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