Introduction to Social Analysis:
Week 5: Being Different
How do people manage being
different?
• What can be learnt about everyday
interaction from impediments, disruption,
or normative breech? Studying
impediments to interaction can reveal the
unnoticed taken for granted basis required
for interaction. It can show us how the
management of a spoiled identity, roles,
masks, and emotion is achieved.
• Reading:
• Mark Hyde Chapter 11 “Disability” in Payne, G. (2006)
Social Divisions. 2nd Ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Introduces the ‘social model of disability’.
• Charmaz, K. (2000). “Experiencing Chronic Illness”
Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine.
Albrecht, G, Fitzpatrick, R. and Susan C. Scrimshaw.
London, Sage: 277-292. Summarises the field of the
sociology of illness particularly those which attempt to
engage with an actor perspective. A field in which her
own work is exemplary.
Social model of disability
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“Debates about the meaning of disability in the social science literature
typically centre on two definitions. ‘Official’ or ‘Medical’ definitions tend to
focus on the functional limitations of people with impairments, whereas the
disabled people’s movement has defined disability as the social restrictions
faced by disabled people in their daily lives.” (Hyde 2006:252)
“We define impairment as lacking all or part of a limb, or having a defective
limb, organ or mechanism of the body; and disability as the disadvantage or
restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which
takes no or little account of people with physical impairments and thus
excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities “
(Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation 1976: 14 cited by Hyde
2006:254)
Were there dyslexics before writing was invented? Social expectations of
‘normality’ built into transport, technology, work and social systems.
Mentally handicapped
– used to be employed in routine manual work in sheltered workshops – no longer
any manual work mechanised or sent overseas.
– Teignmouth controversy over holiday scheme – exclusion by fear
• Studies:
• Goffman Erving 1963 Stigma notes on the
management of spoiled identity
Englewood Cliffs Prentice-Hall 301.11
GOF
Stigmata
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Stigmata
"Stigmata is a phenomenon
observed in a number of
Christian saints and mystics for
which no satisfactory natural
explanation has been offered
yet. It consists of the
appearance, on the body of a
living person, of wounds or
scars corresponding to those
of the crucified Christ. The first
and most celebrated
stigmatization of this kind is
that of St. Francis of Assisi."
Encyclopedia Britannica.
• Impression management - interaction strategies in
problematic situations.
• Stigma - managing a spoiled identity
• “A stigma, then, is really a special kind of relationship
between attribute and stereotype
• 3 kinds of stigma • physical deformities - deviant physical appearance.
• blemishes of individual character - deviant social traits
alcoholism, criminality, mental health.
• “tribal stigma” of race, nation, and religion - labels
inherited through the family.
• Almost anything can become stigmatised Goffman tries to generalise the interactional
strategies for dealing with them.
• cure,
• concealment,
• bravado - defiance - challenge
• burden and blessing – ‘given me new insight’
• avoidance - segregation
• Asylums - staff strategies, inmate strategies.
Charmaz, Kathy. 1991 Good days, bad days
: the self in chronic illness and time New
Brunswick, N.J : Rutgers University Press
She describes her purpose in writing the book as
• to look deeply into the experience of chronic illness,
starting from the perspective of ill people themselves
• to explore different ways that people experience chronic
illness and to examine their implications for the emerging
self, and
• to show how the struggle for control over illness and for
control over time is a struggle to control the defining
images of self.
Living with a serious illness means
overcoming stigmatizing judgments
• “Progressive gains. Plummeting losses. Plateau. At forty-none,
Nancy Swenson experienced each phase during her eight years of
debilitating symptoms from carcinoid tumors. When Nancy was very
sick, her illness drained her of energy, pulled her into her physical
self, obliterated her ability to concentrate, impaired her vision, and
robbed her of sleep. Increasingly her medications resulted in more
symptoms, including lethargy and depression. From an
overwhelming physical dependence to an independence that belied
her condition, Nancy Swenson experienced the good days and bad
days that marked her illness.
• After two years of contesting negative decisions on her application
for a disability benefit through Social Security, Nancy received a
temporary benefit.” (Charmaz 1991:1)
• She continues the story in Nancy’s own words:
So Chamaz gives an account of how Nancy manages good days and bad days
while caring for a mother with Alzhiemers, unreliable children, and dodgy
tenants and how she would like to have remarried but cannot afford to as it
would cost her state medical support.
Withdrawal, management of time
• Frequently, ill people limit their activity and
autonomy rather than tacitly affirm that they
have suffered further physical losses. To them,
acknowledging decline symbolizes an intolerable
assault on their self-concepts. Illness threatens
to leave a permanent stigma.
• Charmaz develops on the experience of time,
such as strategies to view their chronic illness as
temporary to avoid acknowledging a negative
identity.
Disclosure
• “the social repercussions of requesting help may prove
too costly. Here, learning about chronicity includes
learning about stigma. Lin Bell, a middle-aged woman
with heart disease, worked as a janitor with a team of
men. After her first bypass surgery she said:
• “I have a lifting restriction on me at work and if the guys
see – they are always coming by and saying, “Now you
take it easy” and we have these great big barrels that we
roll around and fill with trash and stuff and if they see me
going, heading out… to the dumpster to dump that,
they’re right there, real protective. But I won’t ask. I don’t
want any special treatment. I don’t like to be treated as
less than I feel that I am.” (Charmaz 1991:22)
Strategies of packaging and
passing
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“Many people want to keep their intrusive illness hidden – at least in public,
if not also from self; they work at keeping illness contained. They try not to
let it rule their lives. They wish to continue at least a semblance of their
former lives. Above all, they refuse to rely on their illness as a ready-made
excuse for shirking obligations. They may also fear loss and rejection due to
stigma. Hence, these people try to keep illness contained through two
interrelated strategies: packaging and passing. Packaging means
presenting the self so that illness remains contained, separate from the
public, and usually, the private self. Passing means functioning without
detection of either the illness or its effects.” p.66
One of the examples she gives of packaging is Vera who describes her
illness as a ‘condition’ and said “it used to be separate from my life; it used
to be something that only when other people forced me to, I’d pay attention
to, or only when I pushed myself too far, I’d pay attention to. … I don’t want
to be a sick person.”
Examples of passing include not merely non-disclosure but use of others in
the know to monitor and stand-in when the mask is slipping.
Moral career, judgments of
incompetence
• “Ill people, like this woman who had a bowel dysfunction,
find “that I can talk about this disease but that I can’t find
anyone to listen.” Although she spoke freely about her
pain and sudden diarrhoea to immediate co-workers,
they cut her off. She needed support and care from her
lover, but he could not tolerate the dirt and disorders her
condition caused and therefore he either ignored or
castigated her. As Mitteness (1987) points out, bodily
control is a prerequisite to competent adult status. Thus,
the lack of such control goes beyond forcing disclosure;
it threatens to elicit judgments of inadequacy and
incompetence. To the extent that others impose their
judgments and that ill people share them, they will avoid
both disclosures and situations in which their symptoms
might become apparent.” (Charmaz 1991:117)
“Cooling the Mark Out”
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Erving Goffman is seen as the founding father of symbolic interactionism. His early
pioneering paper “Cooling the Mark Out” published in Studies in Social Process
(Rose 1960) dealt chiefly with interactional strategies for adaptation to loss of status:
with defences, consolations, mitigations, compensations, and the like.
... a mark who requires cooling out is a person who can no longer sustain one of his
social roles and is about to be removed from it; he is a person who is losing one of
his social lives and is about to die one of the deaths that are possible for him. This
leads one to consider the ways in which we can go or be sent to our death in each of
our social capacities, the ways , in other words, of the handling the passage from the
role that we had to a state of having it no longer. (Goffman 1960:503)
The central focus of his argument is to reveal how the con man who wants the mark
to go home quietly and absorb a loss, the restaurant hostess who wants a customer
to eat quietly and go way without causing trouble, attempt to deal with the interaction.
He argues that underlying these interactions there is the assumption that persons are
institutionally related to each other in such a way that if a mark allows himself to be
cooled out, then the cooler need have no further concern with him. Goffman also
points out that there is also the assumption that persons are sentimentally related to
each other in such a way that if a person allows himself to be cooled out, however
great the loss he has sustained, then the cooler withdraws all emotional identification
from him, but if the mark cannot absorb the injury to his self and if he becomes
personally disorganised in some way, then the cooler cannot help but feel guilt and
concern over the predicament.
Goffman concludes that it is this feeling of guilt, this small of measure of social
involvement in the feelings of others which helps to make the job of cooling the mark
out distasteful, wherever it appears. It is this incapacity to be insensitive to the
suffering another person when he brings his suffering right to your door which tends
to make the job of cooling a species of dirty work.