Sociology 2259 Lecture Notes - Erving Goffman, Vise, Stereotype
132 views4 pages
9 Feb 2013
School
Department
Course
Professor
Goffman & Stigma – Chapter 3
Chapter 3 Overview
•Examines:
◦The stigmatized individual's sense of self
▪“Ambivalence of self”
◦Context that impact or affect this sense of self
▪“In-group/us” vs. “out-group/them”
▪“Own” vs. “wise”
◦The nature of these contexts
◦Ambivalence of self due to:
▪Mixed messages from in-group AND out-group
▪Degree of seriousness that you take your stigma to be (conditional vs. genuine)
◦Stigmatized person more than normally want a distinct sense of self
◦Even if a stigmatized person is told they are accepted in society it is often times conditional
Identity
•Social Identity: social expectation of the individual—based on constructs of stereotypes,
assumptions, and relationships
•Personal Identity: the information that just you knows about yourself
•Ego Identity (Erkison): an individual's “felt” identity—a subjective sense of his/her own
situation, continuity, and character
◦How someone personally perceives themselves, but often is influenced by their social
identity
◦How do they create images of themselves, passing, management, etc
◦What an individual comes to personally experience based on social and personal situations
◦Basically, comprised of BOTH social and personal identity
Identity Ambivalence
•Identity Ambivalence: you receive mixed messages about your place in society—you learn the
standards of the “out-group”...yet you are said to belong to the “in-group”
◦A stigmatized individuals experiences this ambivalence due to the gap between his/her
“reality” and that he/she applied to him/herself
◦About not wanting to align with the in-group, but also don't want to be stigmatized by
society
◦Acquires identity standards that he/she apply to themselves, but they know that they fail to
conform to them—can cause people to experience different types of ambivalence
•Expressions of identity ambivalence:
◦Fluctuations in identity
▪Individual will often feels fluctuations of identity (oscillation same as fluctuation)
◦Associating with their “own”
▪Might associate with similar people who are stigmatized—easier to identify
◦Stratification of their “own”
▪When the individual creates a hierarchy of people who are stigmatized
◦Social alliances (in-group vs. out-group)
▪The more allied with normals, the more the individual will see themselves in non-