ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the ways that smoker-related stigma intersects with other forms of health-based stigma affecting bodies that, on the basis of non-heteronormative sexual and/or gender variance, have been historically constructed as pathological, risky and deviant within the dominant health establishment. In much of the global North, tobacco smoking has become significantly less socially acceptable over the past several decades, largely due to tobacco control policies and shifting societal attitudes about tobacco, tobacco companies and tobacco use. The state of California helped pioneer tobacco de-normalisation strategies and is considered a leader in tobacco control and in making smoking socially unacceptable or stigmatised. However, in much of the United States, smoking is now systematically concentrated among certain groups of people, many of whom have been stigmatised by and historically marginalised in institutional, political and social structures. This chapter will focus on adults in California who experience stigma due to what are often considered ‘deviant’ sexual and/or gender identities and whose prevalence of smoking far exceeds that of the general population – here referred to as ‘queer’ people, but in other contexts often called ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender’ (LGBT) or ‘sexual and gender minorities’ (SGM). We utilise narrative data from 201 ethnographically informed interviews with queer current and former smokers in California to explore the implications and unintended consequences of a tobacco control policy environment that mobilises stigma to make smoking socially unacceptable.
