Underdogs

Social Deviance and Queer Theory

Heather Love

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226761244
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

A pathbreaking genealogy of queer theory that traces its roots to an unexpected source: sociological research on marginal communities in the era before Stonewall. The sociology of "social deviants" flourished in the United States at midcentury, studying the lives of outsiders such as homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, drug addicts, and political radicals. But in the following decades, many of these downcast figures would become the architects of new social movements, activists in revolt against institutions, the state, and social constraint. As queer theory gained prominence as a subfield of the humanities in the late 1980s, it seemed to inherit these radical, activist impulses—challenging not only gender and sexual norms, but also the nature of society itself.With Underdogs, Heather Love shows that queer theorists inherited as much from sociologists as they did from activists. Through theoretical and archival work, Love traces the connection between midcentury studies of deviance and the antinormative, antiessentialist field of queer theory. While sociologists saw deviance as an inevitable fact of social life, queer theorists embraced it as a rallying cry. A robust interdisciplinary history of the field, Underdogs stages a reencounter with the practices and communities that underwrite radical queer thought.

1 • The Stigma Archive

One finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality. When his audience is also convinced in this way about the show he puts on—and this seems to be the typical case—then for the moment at least, only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the “realness” of what is presented.

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life1

In a 1994 essay “A Queer Encounter: Sociology and the Study of Sexuality,” Steven Epstein offers an early appraisal of the influence of empirical studies of sexuality for the emergent field of queer studies. Noting that “queer theory and sociological theory confront one another with some suspicion, and more profoundly with misrecognition,” Epstein traces the continuities and the disjunctions between postwar studies of sexual life and the humanities field of queer theory.2 With a focus on deviance studies, symbolic interactionism, and labeling theory, Epstein argues that these scholars departed from behaviorism and biologism to reframe sexuality in the realm of ordinary social life. Despite such debts, Epstein observes that younger scholars tend to come to social construction theory “directly from the work of Foucault, bypassing the social sciences” (194). The problem, he suggests, is that deviance studies scholars assumed the permanent marginality of sexual minorities; their account of the dilemmas of social underdogs and outsiders did not survive the advent of a liberationist era. “Applied to lesbians and gay men,” Epstein writes, “the sociology of deviance was the sociology of the closet” (194). Queer theory, by contrast, was premised on “the centrality of marginality” (189). “Just as queer politics emphasize outsiderness as a way of constructing opposition to the regime of normalization as a whole,” he continues, “so queer theory analyzes putatively marginal experience, but in order to expose the deeper contours of the whole society and the mechanisms of its functioning” (197, emphasis in original).

Erving Goffman’s 1963 Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity is the book he wrote most closely identified with deviance studies. Although it doesn’t focus on homosexuality, its attitude toward marginality is most easily assimilated to what Epstein characterizes as “the sociology of the closet.” The book seems to maintain a clear distinction between norm and margin and to focus on the adjustment of the stigmatized to prevailing conventions. As such, Stigma seems far from the oppositional politics of queer theory, and yet, surprisingly, the book is an essential source text for the field of queer studies. Goffman’s interests—shame, institutions, passing, failure, agency, and power—link him to key concerns in the field. The influence of his 1959 book Presentation of Self in Everyday Life on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity in Gender Trouble (1990) is rarely remarked. Goffman’s interest in total institutions and in the broader abuses of the mental health field link him closely to the antipsychiatry movement and to the career of Michel Foucault. He also shares with Foucault an interest in the microdynamics of power, and in normalization as a ubiquitous form of social control.3 Goffman directly inspired foundational texts like Laud Humphreys’s Tearoom Trade (1970) and Esther Newton’s Mother Camp (1972). He also stands in the background of performance studies and affect studies, fields that are foundational to queer studies, and Stigma in particular has a central if vexed presence in critical disability studies.4 Scholars in the interdisciplinary humanities have started to recognize this influence, focusing on the intellectual history of the postwar period. Didier Eribon brought attention to the salience of Goffman’s thinking about shame and stigma for contemporary queer life in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (2004 [1999]).5 In Tame Passions of Wilde (2003), Jeff Nunokawa considers Goffman in relation to Foucault and Butler: he sees in Goffman’s attention to individual agency an alternative to Foucault’s “pessimistic structuralism,” and, in his focus on “farcical” or failed social performances, a drag on Butler’s political optimism.6 In his 2013 book Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar Culture, Michael Trask traces the links between dramaturgical sociology (including Goffman’s) and postwar US queer culture. Trask performs a historical leap to the midcentury analogous to Sedgwick’s turn to the cybernetic fold; he traces a link between the focus on performance in 1950s sociology and on artifice in queer theory, and sees in both a resistance to the discourse of authenticity embraced by the student activists of the 1960s.7

Despite these connections, Goffman may seem an unlikely precursor for queer studies. Homosexuality appears in his work as merely one example of the kinds of disadvantaged traits that can be stigmatized. Furthermore, Goffman’s attention to the “small change of social interaction” and his refusal of politics make him a challenging figure for any field of inquiry dedicated to social transformation.8 Many critics have faulted Goffman for his failure to account for the structures of power that determine everyday experience. In paying attention to minute happenings in the realm of social interaction, they argue, he neglected the large-scale inequality and violence that structure it. Goffman meticulously described the everyday and microscopic effects of social marginalization, but cultivated a pose of neutrality toward these outrages. He repeatedly insisted that he was an analyst, not an activist. A former student recalls a blunt but not atypical statement in a methods class Goffman taught at the University of Pennsylvania: “I’m not into politics.” (In case you missed that: “I am not interested in serving any population or making anyone live better.”)9 He adopted the stance of the bystander, observing acts of cruelty with the eye of a satirist rather than a reformer. Although Goffman did not see anything natural about the social order and was keenly attuned to its points of vulnerability, he accepted its stability as a fact. For this reason, he was skeptical about the ability of “militant” groups to organize social life on radically different lines: “When the ultimate political objective is to remove stigma from the differentness, the individual may find that his very efforts can politicize his own life, rendering it even more different from the normal life initially denied him” (Stigma, 114).

In formulating his theory of stigma, Goffman drew on accounts of the lives of those who are “engaged in some kind of collective denial of the social order”: “Prostitutes, drug addicts, delinquents, criminals, jazz musicians, bohemians, gypsies, carnival workers, hobos, winos, show people, full time gamblers, beach dwellers, homosexuals, and the urban unrepentant poor” (143–44). These are categories of people familiar from midcentury deviance studies. Unlike others in the field, however, Goffman didn’t maintain a steady focus on an individual category, refusing to pay sustained ethnographic or any other kind of attention to individual kinds of identity. Instead, he exploited the miscellaneous nature of these outsiders and underdogs, comparing unlike figures relentlessly in order to generate concepts for his theory of stigma. Using this method, he refused to credit the integrity of identity. On the one hand, this led him to disrespect and diminish the full human qualities of individual actors. On the other hand, it led him to free up the kind of individuals most often represented in the human sciences, undermining the deadly seriousness of many treatments of the socially marginal. Goffman seemed to rip the stuffing from the key characters in deviance studies by stripping them of the moral fiber most often used to condemn their behavior. He also used the technique of excessive listing in order to pile up examples of deviants and thus to suggest a baroque and antic quality in the entire enterprise. Through these methods of hyperbole and irony, Goffman made the subject matter of deviance studies and the energies of alienation available for resignification.

In the last paragraph of Stigma, we can see Goffman making a concerted plea for the value of comparison in demoting content in order to attend to concept:

I have argued that stigmatized persons have enough of their situations in life in common to warrant classifying all these persons together for purposes of analysis. An extraction has thus been made from the traditional fields of social problems, race and ethnic relations, social disorganization, criminology, social pathology, and deviancy—an extraction of something all these fields have in common. These commonalities can be organized on the basis of very few assumptions regarding human nature. What remains in each one of the traditional fields could then be re-examined for whatever it is that is really special to it, thereby bringing analytical coherence to what is not purely historic and fortuitous unity. Knowing what fields like race relations, aging, and mental health share, one could then go on to see, analytically, how they differ. Perhaps in each case the choice would be to retain the old substantive areas, but at least it would be clear that each is merely an area to which one should apply several perspectives, and that the development of any one of these coherent analytic perspectives is not likely to come from those who restrict their interest exclusively to one substantive area. (146–47)

Goffman’s discussion of the “extractions” made from substantive areas for the purposes of efficient analysis seems to ally him with the top-down, instrumental approach of Cold War social science. Yet, paradoxically, his lack of concern for the specificity of sexuality links him to the anti-identitarian field of queer theory. Unlike scholars in gay and lesbian studies, queer scholars did not focus on any one “substantive area.” Instead, drawing from the history of sexuality, feminist thought, and critical race studies, queer scholars sought to find commonalities among all those arrayed along society’s margins. Eve Sedgwick describes this aspect of queer thought in “Queer and Now” (1993): “A lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality crisscross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses.”10 Sedgwick along with many of her peers in the first generation of queer theory shared with Goffman a commitment to the miscellaneous, centrifugal force of identity. This resulted both in a hesitation about focusing solely on the lives of gay men and lesbians and a striking ability to register the role of the contingent and aleatory in the constitution of the self. (See Sedgwick’s Axiom 1 in Epistemology of the Closet: “People are different from each other.”11) In queer theory, unlike in Goffman’s work, there was an attempt to blend this approach with more timely and pressing approaches drawn from critical race theory and other fields, such as intersectionality. This combination of a strict refusal of gay and lesbian identity politics with a drive outward toward other forms of difference resulted both in queer theory’s remarkable reach and success, and in charges of false universalism.

Goffman’s war against substance was waged not only against identity but also against the idea of the person. One of the values of extraction and comparison as methods is that they yield an account of stigma that “can be organized on the basis of very few assumptions regarding human nature.” Goffman does not understand “human nature” as a tool to dignify and enrich the lives of the stigmatized. Instead, he sees the extension of humanity to social outsiders as part of the burden that they have to bear—the burden of well-meaning concern, advice, and sympathy. In protest against this kind of liberal understanding, Goffman considers the lives of the stigmatized from the outside. Although he draws on a wide variety of sources, many of them literary and autobiographical, Goffman ignores these stories’ psychological content and narrative form. Instead, he treats them as “strips of behavior,” or brief sequences of social action, which constitute the raw material for analysis.12 The dynamics of stigma are visible in gesture, tone of voice, spacing, and body posture: he considers human action as a set of empirically observable performances, rather than as the disclosure of an essence.

Scholars have criticized Goffman for his “black box” psychology and for his denuded, game-like view of the social world.13 These elements of his work have led critics to see him as an avatar of Cold War social science, with little concern for the vulnerable subjects whose lives he mined for concepts.14 But, as I argue, the blank, empty selves that circulate in Goffman’s writing are designed to repel the incursions of both lay observers and of social scientists. Goffman’s refusal of interiority sidesteps the forms of surveillance that do not stop at visual observation but aim, in Foucault’s words, to “trace the meeting line of the body and the soul.”15 Goffman’s stripped-down psychology and his atomizing view of the social world are not intended to stabilize the social order, nor to integrate outsiders into a smoothly functioning nation. Rather, they are an attempt, in George Gonos’s words, to “defeat humanism in the sanctuary of its most endeared and protected subject, everyday face-to-face relations.”16 Inserting Goffman into a history of queer theory makes clear the political stakes of his antihumanism, as well as the more serious investments of critics sometimes seen as postmodern tricksters or cynics. What these critics continue from Goffman is a refusal of the human that is intended to ward off the scrutiny of an institutional gaze that finds both anchor and alibi in the core of the person.

In “A Queer Encounter,” Epstein argues that postwar sociology contributed to the project of displacing the normal. But, he suggests, these efforts were limited by a naturalized understanding of the relation between norm and margin—an understanding that was finally challenged by the field of queer studies. Epstein writes,

A presumed goal of the sociology of deviance . . . was to study the processes by which people become labeled deviant, so as to reveal, by contrast, the ideological construction of “the normal.” In practice, however, sociologists have tended to relegate the study of “sexual minorities” to the analytical sidelines rather than treating such study as a window onto a larger world of power, meaning, and social organization. The challenge that queer theory poses to sociological investigation is precisely in the strong claim that no facet of social life is fully comprehensible without an examination of how sexual meanings intersect with it. (197)

Epstein aptly describes the intellectual and political ambition of queer theory, which sought to challenge the categories—homo/hetero, male/female—that made sexual minorities legible, but also lesser. In accounting for the shift from deviant studies to queer studies, Epstein also indicates the social changes, in particular the loss of a single prevailing norm, that made that intellectual transition possible. But changes were afoot much earlier.

Goffman didn’t explicitly contest the relation between norm and margin. To the extent that Goffman expressed partisanship with social underdogs, he did so in terms characteristic of liberal second-wave deviance studies. Yet the profound negations of Goffman’s sociology void the sympathy that grounds such scholarship. Goffman’s view of the social world relies on the professional detachment of the social scientist but also includes the corrosive distance of the “socially disgruntled.” He combined objectification and alienation, recasting the scientist’s scrutiny as a view from the margins. For Goffman, there were only sidelines: deviance was, in his view, the truth of social life. Yet this perspective, although it is consonant with the radical antinormativity of queer theory, nonetheless remains difficult to acknowledge or to integrate, since it was fundamentally world destroying rather than world building.

Goffman’s Method

Goffman identified the focus of his research as “ordinary persons doing ordinary things.”17 He described the embodied and the ephemeral aspects of everyday reality, considering gesture, clothing, spacing, facial expression, manner, and tone of voice; he was remarkably sensitive to uses of language and to the contingencies of interaction, particularly to those mistakes that open minor gaps in the social fabric. Goffman turned his attention to the local, bounded situation, small-group dynamics, and face-to-face interaction—the world of the “interaction order.”18 In the introduction to Frame Analysis (1974), his culminating statement on method, Goffman writes, “My perspective is situational, meaning here a concern for what one individual can be alive to at a particular moment, this often involving a few other particular individuals and not necessarily restricted to the mutually monitored area of a face-to-face gathering” (8). Goffman’s focus on the situation is indebted to his training in empirical methods and ethnographic sociology at the University of Chicago. There he absorbed the interactionist tradition of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, and was influenced by Durkheim’s account of social ritual. Gary Alan Fine identifies Goffman as a member of the second Chicago school, and argues that he added observational detail and ethnographic richness to Mead’s insights about the nature of social interaction.19 Goffman’s attention to the details of social scenes also recalls his early interest in documentary film. Before finishing his undergraduate degree, Goffman worked at the National Film Board of Canada in Ottawa, identified with the filmmaker John Grierson and an early site for the development of direct cinema.

Goffman is difficult to categorize in the major traditions of sociology. He tended to favor sketches over systems, and even his attempt to offer a synthetic account of his method, Frame Analysis, launches a series of ...