Social Deviance

Stuart Henry, Lindsay M. Howard

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509523542
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The new edition of this popular introduction explores the meaning of social deviance in contemporary society. It traces the path by which we create deviance: how we single out behavior, ideas, and appearances that differ from the "norm, " label them as either offensive or acceptable, and then condemn or celebrate them. The book explains what kinds of behavior are banned and who bans them, exposing the important political influences underlying these processes. Refreshed with a new engaging, accessible style, the second edition features expanded treatment of the theories of deviance, new material on positive deviance, and updated references and contemporary examples throughout. At its core, Social Deviance looks at who becomes deviant and why. It delves into the multiple motives that cause rule-breakers to behave badly in the eyes of those they offend or creatively in the eyes of those they please, and it reveals the way deviants think about their actions, their moral identity, and their fellow moral outcasts.

1
What is Deviance?

The objective of this short book is to spark your deviant imagination in the way that University of Kent Professor Steve Box sparked mine. Let's start by reflecting on my own working-class South London life, which was vibrant with deviant insights resulting from street life and its characters, bad-ass reputations, and damaged “sicko” identities. These were not only barriers that had nearly stopped me from going to university but nuggets of social life through which I would earn a doctorate in deviant behavior! What an astounding revelation to a twenty-year-old from a council flat (in the United States, this is equivalent to “the projects”) who hadn't even believed it possible to get a bachelor's degree, and who had so disappointed his father for abandoning that £5-a-week ($6.60) apprenticeship (equivalent to $50 a week in 2017) with Decca in favor of unproductive “book learning.” Of course, at the time, I had no idea these were valuable experiences. To me they were bad experiences – things to bury, cover up and deny. It took Steve Box to awaken my deviant imagination to the mother lode of riches I had buried and which many other students had not. To me they were embarrassing – a lifestyle I was trying to escape by going to college, and a cluster of nightmares that cast doubt on whether I was simply a college fraud, to be revealed when my delinquent past came out.

Steve was not an easy professor to know. But you couldn't be around him without being charged with questions about why things were the way they seemed. Despite his own academic success, this fellow working-class Londoner never lost sight of his working-class roots. But where we start isn't where we must end. As a working-class South London friend once commented: “Back when I knew you, Stuart, you didn't have two words to rub together!” Where I come from, that would be a compliment, wrapped in envy with a ribbon of resentment.

Let's now take a journey in the daily life of contemporary American student Megan Nesbeth as she becomes aware of deviance in the world around her through taking a sociology class. She says that, after taking sociology, “everything, even ‘mundane shit,' calls for analysis.” I agree. She entitles the piece “To be average is to be deviant”:

Deviance is at its core a social construction that is used to maintain social order. The “normal” draw lines for the population to follow. As a society we pay homage to these lines and experience anxiety when they are crossed. We hold the categories that we have created as holy and respect them as naturally occurring phenomena that have always been drawn in stone as a guide for behavior. We act as if race and social class created themselves as organizational blocks of what people should expect in life. We act as if child brides were never a Western phenomenon and as if Ashton and Demi, now that they have been validated by the media, are the first couple to ever have such a large age gap in their relationship. We pretend that on the day that a person turns twenty-one their brain is suddenly extremely less susceptible to the damages of alcohol … and significantly more mature to make decisions about drinking.

9:00 a.m. Get to the gym. Put my iPod on and get on elliptical machine. Read some Catcher in the Rye while on the elliptical. Secretly think I am Holden Caufield at heart. I would argue that, if we had never invented deviance, secrets wouldn't exist, and if we think about how silly most secrets are our continual need to label people as deviant seems a bit silly too. A secret is just a secret because someone decided that whatever is being kept secret is unacceptable public behavior or knowledge. What's so different between secrets and deviance?

10:30 a.m. Walk back from the gym. Call mom. Ask again about taking time off from school. She tells me that time off is only for people who are screwing up or get pregnant or go crazy or … I drop the argument. I always drop the argument, partly because, even though I think that the American model of formal education leads to widespread and excessive burn out which I often experience, college isn't that bad, and I have been conditioned to be here for four years. Besides I would much rather be controlled through the apparatuses of civil society than those of the state … Of course, there are a range of other possibilities such as not attending college at all, attending a two-year college, attending college part-time while working, and taking time off during college. Each of these options is marked by race, class, gender, nationality, geography, and other increasingly multitudinous social factors. These factors combine to create different potential responses along a continuum of stigma and acceptance for the same decision made by different people. Whether they admit it or not there is a way in which as a black female I am already the discredited, so my parents worry about me playing with the things that make me the discreditable. Maybe I worry about it too, but not as much.

11:00 a.m. Psychology class. Praise the American Psychiatric Association a little for perfecting social control through the DSM.

12:15 p.m. Lunch. Absolutely hate lunch at this time because it's so crowded. It makes me feel institutionalized.

1:30 p.m. Deviance and Social Order class. Professor is being deviant again – you know, flexible and understanding. Reasonable. Okay, professors aren't bad in general.

2:45 p.m. Lit Theory class. All of the theorists that we are reading were considered deviant in their times. I'm surprised that more of them weren't hung or put on house arrest or something. Jaywalk on my way back to my dorm. A driver angrily shakes his hand at me. Deviance is always relative. What is acceptable in one era is reprehensible in another. What is okay in the city is punishable on the farm.

4:30 p.m. Go back to room. Check in with friends. Turn on computer. Check email and Facebook. Watch funny video on the homepage of Slate Magazine, a respectable, but entertaining on-line magazine. Do some homework. Think about the fact that paying a lot of money for the privilege of working really hard to the end of working really hard for the rest of your life is unnatural.

6:00 p.m. Dinner. Partake in the Middlebury two-bowl dinner ritual: Make dinner i.e. a salad and throw on some dressing and use the second bowl to shake it. I like doing it because I think it looks cool like when someone makes me a tossed salad at a deli and it spreads the dressing well. My friends give me the look. I remind them that I'm going to get other food too.

7:00 p.m. Do some more homework. Feel a little bit depressed; wonder if I need Zoloft.

10:00 p.m. Hang out with friends. Spike some cider, because drinking on week-nights is more acceptable in college and during certain parts of the year. We call it a holiday party so it's okay. Watch some Mean Girls and The Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Someone brings up pole dancing … wish the classes were cheaper. The entertainment industry should praise daily the constructions of normalcy and deviance. Most entertainment especially in terms of movies and television are based on deviance in that they either draw strength from their universality, that is the way in which everyone can relate and is the same because the experience depicted is expected; normal, or they draw off of the attraction to that which falls somewhere other than on the list of what is normal, accepted, or expected; deviant. Even in terms of activities people always want to try things that seem risqué, whether it's bungee jumping or pole dancing, both of which have become increasingly popular over the years. In the case of pole dancing the activity's transformation from something meant only for strippers to something for average women to do for exercise and to feel sexy reads as similar to the re-appropriation of negative words that has always been common with disenfranchised groups.

1:00 a.m. Sleep.

We live through our transgressions. In my eyes life is most invigorating when we're breaking the rules. I don't care what you call it – deviant behavior, secrets or crime – we all deviate. Picking up where Erickson left off, I would claim that deviance is necessary not only for the maintenance of the society, but also the enrichment of the individual. If establishing laws is a way for the “authorities” in a society to claim phallic power for themselves, purposeful deviance is an assertion of agency and a claim to phallic power on an individual level. Of course, not all deviance is planned since deviance only becomes deviance once enough people with power label it as such, but the existence of “deviance” is what allows us to live in a world in which we're not all like-minded cyborgs. (Nesbeth, 2008: reproduced with permission)

To study deviance is to study uncertainty. Students of deviance are looking at society's edge. That is the edge beyond social order. Deviance here is defined as disorder – not normal, not acceptable. Whose edge or what edge, whose order and whose disorder, and why it is even an edge of order and disorder – all are uncertainties to be discovered by students of deviance. Deviance encompasses a wide range of behaviors, demeanors, identities, appearances, styles, attitudes, and beliefs. This is because what's deviant varies between individuals, societies, cultures, social contexts, and historical eras. Views differ on how deviant actors and judgmental audiences interact and interrelate. For example, Tenashia might find drinking to excess unacceptable, whereas Jonathan might not. He may act differently around her to avoid any sort of sanction of his actions, but he also may keep his own opinions and beliefs to himself. He is also now, as Megan noted in her blog diary, keeping secrets, and that could be seen as deviant too. If Tenashia were twenty-one and Jonathan eighteen, she might be concerned that his behavior would get her into trouble, as he would be under the legal drinking age in the United States. In England, not so, because the legal drinking age is eighteen and drinking to excess by older teens and young adults is a norm. Indeed, in Britain, Tenashia might be the deviant for believing excessive drinking is a problem, and she might keep her views secret for fear of being labeled “prudish.” Notice too that, even in the USA, some contexts accommodate excessive drinking while others do not, and that's not just frat parties. “Dr. Henry, why is the university having graduation on Mother's Day? We would normally get ‘smashed' but our mothers will be here! That sucks!”

At its simplest, the sociology of deviance is the systematic study of social norm violation that is subject to social control and sanction. Sanctions can involve reproach, shaming, social exclusion, or some other depravation or infliction of pain. They can be as minimal as a “look” of the kind Megan got at lunch from fellow students questioning why she was only having a salad, to being excommunicated by a church or other religious group, to more formal punishments administered by the state, from prison to the death penalty.

The study of social sanctions is called the study of “social control” (see Chriss, 2013). “Behind this seemingly simple and clear-cut definition [of deviance,] however, lurks a swarming host of controversies” (Adler and Adler, 2006: 3). In part, this is because the study of deviance, and for that matter social control, is also the study of the politics of social life on the edge. In this political conflict, we find two clearly identifiable positions. One of these is known variously as the “relativist” or “social constructionist” position and the other as the “absolutist,” “positivist,” or “realist” position. From the relativist/constructivist perspective, deviance is “lodged in the eye of the beholder rather than in the act itself, and it may vary in the way it is defined by time and place.” This perspective “sees deviance as ‘subjectively problematic,' … and takes as its primary task an understanding of how judgments of deviance are put together and with what consequences” (Goode, 2007: 1075). Put simply, the relativist expects everyone to have their own take on each action, their own opinion or view.

At the opposite extreme, the absolutist-realist perspective sees deviance as possessing predetermined or universal features such that something obvious within an act, belief, or condition “makes it different from the norm,” and that “it embodies the unambiguous, objective ‘essence' of true or real deviance” (Goode, 2007: 1075). Thus, the realist believes that people have the same core beliefs and values, tied to truth, nature, or God. For Goode, absolutists have relied upon theories that “regard deviance as ‘objectively given,' that is, a syndrome-like entity with … clear-cut, identifiable properties,” where causes can be analyzed by social scientists (ibid.: 1075–6). In contrast, the sociological definition of deviance used in this book embodies aspects of both these positions but is closer to the social constructionists than to the absolutist-realists.

In this book, you will learn about the social processes and the political practices of the actors and audiences that constitute the deviance enterprise or deviance process. On the way you'll discover the excitement, fun, creativity, and chaos, as well as the pain, shame, and suffering, that accompany the world of deviance as it straddles the edge of socially defined normality. You may even glimpse Megan's insight that “purposeful deviance is an assertion of agency” that enriches the individual. We hope that you will also develop an appreciation, if not always sympathy, for the “deviant imagination.”

Normality, difference, and deviance

As sociologists have long pointed out, something is deviant only in relation to what is normal. But what is normal and who gets to decide? Normality implies a common set of shared cultural values and rules or norms about how to behave, appear, or think. Behaving differently, looking differently, and thinking differently can all be considered social deviance when in violation of social norms and values. For example, everyone eats, so eating is normal behavior, right? But what if some people eat only vegetarian food? Is that deviant? What if they are grossly underweight and they eat only small portions of a vegetable diet, so they appear unhealthily thin? Is that deviant behavior and deviant appearance?

As well as differences in behavior, deviance can include having and/or displaying certain physical attributes that others consider deviant, such as stuttering or being excessively short, physically disfigured, fat, or thin. Anorexics, for example, can be considered deviant. Are they deviant in appearance but not behavior, and do we explain that by saying they have a fast metabolism? What if they are bulimic such that they eat normally but forcibly throw up in the bathroom after meals? Is that deviant because of their behavior but not their appearance? Is their appearance deceptive because it covers their deviant, and perhaps secret, behavior?

Social deviance includes everything from minor norm- or rule-violating behavior to behavior that breaks criminal or other laws designed to ban o...