Abstract
Stigma is one of those highly successful, widely applied sociological concepts, a feature of common parlance which also commands an extensive and multi-disciplinary academic literature. With her book Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality, Imogen Tyler sets out to reclaim the stigma concept from the academic who receives most credit for it, Erving Goffman, and put it to use for understanding and ultimately resisting contemporary extractive capitalism. The book is a work of genealogy, theory and ultimately polemic; it is written in a clean and accessible style making it highly readable and persuasive, and a valuable contribution/corrective to stigma studies.
Tyler’s over-arching purpose is twofold: first, to reclaim the stigma concept as a tool of hierarchical power relations and emphasise the deliberate activation of stigma by those in power; and second, to situate this dynamic specifically in the political economy of late neoliberal capitalism. In doing this she theorises stigma as a device of the world system of capitalism. Readers seeking greater understanding of the nuances of stigma, the ways in which it takes hold in some situations and not in others, or the ways in which it becomes internalised and deployed against others will need to look elsewhere, for this book is a grand narrative. It functions as a corrective to researchers who ask smaller questions without understanding the big thing that is going on: the functions and purposes of stigma.
The bulk of the book is dedicated to demonstrating that stigma is not some ineffable localised or interpersonal phenomenon, but is rather deliberately produced and weaponised against socially undesirable groups of people. Different chapters address different groups: racial stigma; stigma against migrants; and the anti-poor stigma that underpins austerity. Patriarchal stigma runs like a thin thread through the whole book, with numerous egregious examples cited in every chapter. Tyler makes it abundantly clear that stigmas coalesce around inequality, feeding upon, strengthening and reproducing existing inequalities (Parker and Aggleton, 2003).
A fundamental point of the book is that stigma is not – in spite of contemporary theorisations – a metaphor. Beginning as most accounts do with the etymology of the term in Ancient Greece, Tyler shows how the deliberate and permanent marking of human bodies is recurrent across time and place. The example which opens the book is especially shocking: it describes Stephanie from Lancaster, slowly dismantled by the cruelty of Tory austerity until she finds herself cutting the words used to describe her into her own body: ‘waste of space/failure/freak/useless/burden/scrounger’.
Tyler goes on to document the material truth of stigma as, to use her phrase, ‘a form of power written on the body’. She highlights the branding of slaves in the Barbados Slave Code (1661) by burning their faces, and the later branding of African slaves throughout the Americas; ‘the history of slavery is the history of capitalism’, she remarks. She takes us on a tour of penal tattoos, beginning with the moment in 1993 when five women arrested in Amritsar, Punjab, India, accused of stealing a purse, were subjected to the carving of the words Jeb Katri (pickpocket) on their foreheads. Parmeshri Devi, one of the women, later lost her son to suicide, which she believes was a consequence of the social stigma placed upon her and by association him. Women in Ancient Greece were prohibited from public speech: a prohibition that was enforced through muzzling. Such acts find echoes in the uses of ‘the scold’s bridle’ against women in Britain from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century: a metal gag not unlike that used on horses to prevent them from startling. Ranging confidently from ancient times to contemporary Britain, the book makes it clear that while stigma operates in subtle ways on social cues, it is always underpinned by real embodied practices, and can only be understood by observing such practices clearly. Thus Tyler unites two theoretical perspectives: a distinctly feminist focus on the body, with a political economic analysis framed by world systems theory.
The book’s most insightful and significant chapter is the one in which Tyler revisits Erving Goffman’s ground-breaking 1963 monograph Stigma: Notes on a Spoiled Identity (Goffman, 1963) (still widely treated as the classic of the field) through the lens of civil rights activism and critical race studies. Tyler highlights that black sociologists have been theorising stigma since W.E.B. Du Bois, although they are often overlooked in the social scientific literature that begins with Goffman. She demonstrates conclusively how Goffman’s seemingly micro-social, apolitical inquiry was steeped in a racial politics which the august scholar attempted to sidestep. One anecdote stands out: Tyler cites Gary Marx, who studied in Goffman’s 1961 class ‘Deviance and Social Control’, depicting an encounter where a black student questioned the value of Goffman’s research insights into the topic: ‘This is all very interesting Professor Goffman, but what’s the use of it for changing the conditions you describe?’ Furious, Goffman responded ‘I’m not in that business’, and stormed out of the room (Marx, 1984).
The anecdote summarises many of the weaknesses of the field of studies that Goffman inaugurated with his 1963 book. Goffman correctly identified that stigma is a feature of social relations produced in social settings, rather than a fixed attribute of any individual; yet he went on to focus not on the act of stigmatisation, but on the nature of the disgrace that attaches to it. In the concluding chapter, Tyler analyses one contemporary anti-stigma campaign, a mental health initiative called Heads Together, patronised by members of the British royal family. The campaign serves as an instructive example of how Goffman’s ultimately micro-level conceptualisations of stigma operate in practice. Like much anti-stigma work, Heads Together operates through efforts to ‘change the conversation’ about mental health in British society, thus increasing ‘tolerance’ for particular conditions. Of course, the truth is that mental health is embedded in ‘a whole host of more fundamental cultural, political and economic questions regarding the distribution of distress in our society’ (Davies, 2017) – and in this case, anti-stigma campaigns serve as a cover for those questions, producing the illusion that something is being done to tackle real social distress, while the cultural, political and economic power grab goes unchallenged, all the while using stigma as a tool.
A particular strength of the book is its contribution to stigma research methods. The final chapter discusses the uses and abuses of anthropological research and the acts of othering inherent therein. Tyler refers to Goffman as Professor normal, slyly skewering his tendency to address his stigma book to imagined readers-as-peers: ‘we normals’ setting out to understand the experience of the constructed abnormal; and in so doing highlights the ways in which researching and writing about stigma often reconstructs the very phenomenon under investigation. Tyler describes in sharp and insightful detail her own experience of being othered as a teenager growing up in picturesque rural Lancaster, the subject – without the community’s knowledge – of an anthropology PhD research project. She reflects on the power dynamics at play in such research, and the quality of knowledge which emerges; ‘the distance between the “them” about whom the ethnographer writes and the “us” to whom their texts are directed’ (Katz, 1997). The opening of this chapter, evocatively titled Shame Lives on the Eyelids, provides valuable tools to the stigma researcher to expose and reflect on the disciplines of thought in which researchers are taught, and the challenges of making these visible and, where necessary, unlearning them.
The central contention of this book is summarised at the end: there is little that is novel in neoliberalism, Tyler writes, and there is little that is new in stigma power. In this telling, stigma is first and foremost a tool of austerity politics. For those who approach the book from a public health perspective – and this will be many researchers, since the public health literature is replete with stigma studies – this may be a surprising emphasis. And while I find the argument convincing, and in line with essential works cited by Tyler including Link and Phelan’s 2014 Stigma Power (Link and Phelan, 2014) and Parker and Aggleton’s 2003 HIV stigma conceptual framework, I was disappointed not to see the public health literature tied into the book. The decision to emphasise historical and genealogical analysis instead of narrower applied social policy research enables Tyler to move away from Goffman and reconceptualise stigma. But by barely discussing health stigma (the final chapter discusses mental health, and there is a short but valuable summary of the formative work of Paul Hunt on disability; but there is nothing here about HIV, leprosy, abortion, obesity, smoking or any of the other issues which dominate the public health literature), it is almost possible to conclude that those types of stigma do not fit under this frame, that they are not politically charged or targeted as welfare stigma and racial stigma are. In sidestepping the more mainstream stigma discussion, Tyler misses an opportunity to highlight the intersections of health and inequality, arguably one of the most important things that stigma research can contribute, as well as one that is often overlooked (see Stangl et al., 2019).
The book also addresses the question of resistance somewhat frustratingly. There are frequent references to anti-stigma struggles and what they offer for strategies of resistance to authoritarianism, but the engagement with these is ultimately shallow. The civil rights movement, Tyler argues, transformed the stigma of blackness into black power – and yet the truth is that blackness remains stigmatised. The insidiousness of stigma is too easily dismissed with a seeming suggestion that constant struggle can be redemptive. Can it really be described as transformation, if it requires ongoing struggle, generation after generation? The Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission, of which Tyler is a member, and which she draws on extensively in the book, is an excellent example of an anti-stigma initiative, and the bravery of its participants in describing their stigmatised lives impresses – but while their bravery is on show, there is very little transformation. The research on the political emotion of shame, often caused by stigma, is instructive here, a fact that Tyler seems to acknowledge, although she does not pursue it. Shame is isolating, it creates divisive hierarchies and hides itself away, as Sandra Bartky eloquently explains in her 1990 essay Shame and Gender (Bartky, 1990). This dynamic is well-examined for example in empirical research on the stigma and shame of violence against women (for example, Baker, 2013; Buchbinder and Eisikovits, 2003; Taylor, 2018). In truth, although stigma can unite its victims, it is just as likely to divide and separate. While it is right to celebrate resistance, it seems disingenuous not to acknowledge this.
The book lacks any real engagement with the arc of other well-known anti-stigma struggles, including the iconic and transformational international fight against AIDS stigma or the decades-long feminist activism seen in reclaim the night marches, slutwalks, and the most recent #MeToo movement. In-depth reflection on these resistances would demonstrate the resilience of stigma and the ways it resists subversion and turns the target on themselves. While an emphasis on the sources of stigma is essential, so too is a clear-eyed focus on the challenges of fighting those sources. I found the book somewhat glib in its treatment of this aspect.
Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality is an excellent and timely book, and the criticisms presented here mainly amount to a desire for more content, or for a slightly tighter focus. The material that is presented is compelling and often shocking. It is not strikingly original, but it frames existing literature for new audiences with a strong normative focus and a commitment to the struggles of our time. As such, this post-Goffman stigma primer is essential.
