Blog 7: Deviance

Inequality exists where there are deep-sited ideologies that support it (Croteau & Hoynes 126); for example, in the U.S. ideologies that promote individuality and success praise personal achievement while blaming underachievers poor people for not doing enough to get out of poverty. The reason why this ideologies have persisted, even with empirical evidence that point to the fact that poverty is caused by many more intersecting factors like race, class, gender and location, is because the poor and undeserving do actually serve a lot of ‘positive’ functions in the world of rich people. In his article, Herbert Gans talks about these positive functions of undeserving poor. Some I would never think about like supplying popular culture villains (I thought this one stemmed more from a racist mindset...), moral legitimation (makes sense) and reproduction of stigma and stigmatized.

I love that he points out the conflation of ideas around deviancy i.e behavior that is different and behavior that is socially harmful. The tendency to label deviancy negatively stems from the notion that deviancy is socially harmful, which is not true. The distinction between socially different and socially harmful is important because many people do not deviate from their norms just for kicks, they deviate because the dominant culture is oppressive to them. A great example that comes to mind that is a result of this conflation is the belief that gay marriage is deviance because it is socially harmful

The phrase 'undeserving poor' reminds me of Noam Chomsky's Drug Policy as Social Control  where he talks about America's superfluous people and and the efforts to to control them, that is why the drug war was instituted, stop and frisk and other such laws. The positive uses are only positive to rich people, and only serve the functions of the rich and powerful. When their usefulness is deemed unnecessary, they will go back to being simply superfluous.

Now to the six examples of deviance

A few years ago, I got to attend a funeral in which the person had committed suicide. I did not know how negatively deviant this was until I learnt that the local church, which is an example of an agent of social control of which the person was a member of, was not going to officiate the funeral! There were no eulogies. To date the rest of the family is viewed as a bad omen. 

Apart from people who commit suicide, the other deviants who elicit mass ostracization are sex offenders. In cultures all over the world people who defy the norm of consensual sex are labeled as deviants because of under-conform to the expectation of consensual sex.

The textbook does not spend much times talking about positive deviants. These days our uptake to new technologies is so fast we do not think twice about adopting new technologies, especially if they are greener. The current tug of war I see is oil companies advertising aggressively about oil-based energy, especially because there is a positive shift towards solar energy.  Its is a slow moving shift but which will become eventually normalized

Some deviants find company and solace in deviant subcultures for example the rock and rollers from Bergenfield that Donna Gaines chronicles in her article wasteland. Others include tattoo cultures, and homosexual culture.

On the subways, there are piercing advertisements against teen pregnancy. Teen mothers together with single motherhood are examples of deviancy because they do not conform to the accepted trajectory of finishing school, or in other places getting married before having children. These examples can fall into deviance as immorality, especially from the eyes of the religious right.

Herbert Gans does not argue that poverty is a form of deviance, but it is easy to see poverty as deviance especially from the eyes of the rich. In that case, acts like drug peddling and begging can be seen as deviance. Law breaking which statistics show is skewed towards poor people and minorities is explained as a deviance especially because laws, rules and regulations are part of the social contract we have with the government.