Deviance

In the United States, some of our favorite deviants have been homosexuals, women, prostitutes, people who have kinky sex, people who are poor, people who are disabled, and people with mental illnesses—especially when these people are nonwhite, don’t conform to expected gender roles, have “bad” manners, live in the “wrong” neighborhoods, and so on. Fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, criminology, and legal and religious institutions played a central role in how these populations were pathologized as deviant. These disciplines’ beliefs that deviance and biology were fundamentally linked often extended the scientific racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (which made false claims about the inherent and inescapable inferiority of nonwhites, nonmales, and non-Europeans) and shaped public opinion and policy to usually devastatingly violent effects. In the last half of the twentieth century, deviance became a more complex frame of analysis as scholars argued it is of course not biological and that our ideas of who and what is deviant are socially constructed, are historically situated, and change over time (Goffman 1963; Gagnon and Simon 1967, [1973] 2017; Goode [1978] 2016; Schur 1984; G. Rubin 2002; Worthen 2016; Love 2015; Dennis 2018). Scholars—especially feminists, queer theorists, and critical race theorists—reframed “deviance” not as an aberrance to a stable and unchanging norm but as evidence of how racism, misogyny, ableism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia shape definitions and everyday understandings of norms and deviance alike (G. Rubin [1984] 2011; J. Butler [1990] 1999; R. Ferguson 2004; Prohaska and Jones 2017; Puar 2007).