ABSTRACT
Deviance doesn’t always involve behavior; it may be an emotion or a belief, and sometimes it’s how someone looks—as with extreme ugliness. Deviance tends to generate a negative reaction in certain audiences who believe that action, belief, or trait to be unacceptable, intolerable, or wrongful. Deviance is a spectrum, not an either-or proportion—from mild and inconsequential to cataclysmic and ruinous. Sociologists don’t necessarily agree with a given negative assessment or react in such negative ways. No one studying deviance has to feel that the normative violator ought to be chastised, punished, shunned, or denigrated—but, it’s the obligation of all people to notice that certain audiences do in fact react negatively. Notice four implicit features of Marshall Clinard’s definition of deviance as “deviations from social norms which encounter disapproval”. Todd Schoepflin discusses the topic of deviance, namely, how people react negatively to behavior, beliefs, and characteristics they consider wrongful, undesirable, unacceptable—in a word, deviant.
