ABSTRACT
For sociologists stigma is a familiar concept largely made accessible through the work of Goffman (1974). Developing the trajectory of Cooley’s (1902) thought, Goffman (1971) further elaborates that the staged dimensions of human performance have their own regulatory codes, whether written or merely implied, vested in upholding the moral values instituted by the social group to whom the public visage of performance is directed. In his introduction to Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Goffman (1974) observes that the original meaning of stigma, articulated first by the ancient Greeks, referred to visible markings inscribed on the body’s surface. These inscriptions were brandings on flesh which warned of a specific moral breach of character: ‘signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor – a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places’ (Goffman 1974:1). Later, Christian doctrine added skin lesions to the definition, deeming them to be embodied manifestations of holy grace, upon which medical meaning overlaid notions of physical disorder. While contemporary definitions of stigma extend beyond what is corporeally visible, to include blemishes of character and racial or religious affiliation, it remains the case that the body’s appearance is always subject to evaluation and sanction. Goffman introduces Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
(1974:xi) with a letter to the agony aunt Miss Lonelyhearts, written by a sixteen-year-old girl born without a nose who signs her letter ‘Desperate’. The reader is left in little doubt that participation in a regular social life commensurate with that of her peers is something she will be denied. Grappling with her parents’ sense of helplessness and rejection by potential suitors, she is at the point of contemplating suicide. Social death and actual death are imminently convergent and underline the high stakes breaching societal appearance norms might involve. This letter remains deeply moving and provides a poignant example of the mortification a flawed bodily appearance might elicit. The strategic placement of this letter suggests that Goffman understood and indeed empathized with the despair that agonizingly poor body image might engender. He clearly alludes to the darker territories of self-experience invested in the issue of physiological appearance, where the price of a flawed
appearance might entail social exclusion, but the elaboration of stigma as a subjective experience is something he only touches upon. Similarly, in later work on interaction rituals, Goffman (1967) argues that all social encounters are potentially prone to embarrassment and subsequent disorder. He goes on to list and forensically examine the countless strategies which people consciously and unconsciously employ to ensure the restitution of social order that embarrassment threatens. While the avoidance of and recovery from embarrassment are clearly important in face-to face-interaction, Goffman’s interest remains at the level of observable human behaviour and the structures they institute, and he offers only limited insight into the motivations underpinning these behaviours. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, William James (1950) also
gives an evocative description of the hypothetical despair the redundant ‘social self ’ might feel. He contends that the social self is innately dependent on being noticed favourably by others in face-to-face interaction to suggest that favourable social interaction is integral to the very notion of subjectivity. James does not discuss physical appearance specifically, but his demonstrable understanding of the unworthiness registered by those who feel socially excluded resonates with the experience of ‘Desperate’ (in Goffman 1974) mentioned above. They also echo the sense of invisibility and social redundancy experienced by the women in this study who felt compelled to amend their appearance in line with more culturally and socially acceptable forms. James’ insights concur with Goffman’s thesis that appearance remains central to the representation of the self, particularly in face-to-face interaction, but he goes further to suggest that the impact of ensuing evaluations, exquisitely sensed in interactive feedback from others, potentially both shapes the trajectory of the social encounter and subsequently informs assessments regarding self-worth, which the self will make in reviewing its own performance. James writes:
No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.
