A Critical Review of Erving Goffman's Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 1963

Authors Avatar

Ellen Slatter                           Seminar Group: Thursdays 3.30                     Tutor: Milena Stateva

A Critical Review of Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 1963. Published by Penguin Books London, 1990.

In his preface Goffman states his intentions to use ‘popular work’ on stigma as a basis for his own review and expansion within his preoccupation of ‘social information,’ the information an individual directly conveys about himself. The book opens with a letter to a “lonelyhearts” column from a girl born without a nose which concludes ‘Ought I commit suicide?’ This sets the tone for a book which aims to be a comprehensive and illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls “normal.”  

The content of this text is fundamentally textual and is clearly elucidated throughout by real-life anecdotes from varied sources. Citations include revered socio-psychological writers and researchers such as Orbach and Henrich and Kriegel, journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol and other texts such as autobiographies. This link to recognisable situations is appealing and makes his line of reasoning arrant. His exposition poses a basic principle; that the stigmatized individual has a simple choice regarding the attributes he or she has that makes them different. They can either control the information by not letting so called “normals,” i.e. everyone else, know what their secret is if it is not obviously visible, pretending to be normal whilst harbouring the knowledge that their stigma makes them different; or they can let it be known and manage the resulting tension. The ensuing discussion and analysis is founded on the premise that ‘society establishes the means of ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories’ (p2). This system of categorisation itself is not explored or described in any detail. Rather, comprehension and indeed existence of the necessarily complicated matrix of gender, race, age, nationality, speech and many other characteristics is assumed. But the subtitle Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity comes with it a reference to such structural features of society which are virtually ignored after the opening chapter. After this a preoccupation with microsociology, a distance from the consideration of social structure and cultural systems, instead treating them as given, can be seen.

Join now!

The narrative develops this main idea topically in five clearly defined chapters and their sub-sections. This is a structure that seems appropriate enough for the academic audience as, I presume, was Goffman’s intention, but is one that may be a little turgid for a less ardent reader. His writing style is simple enough and could be said to be economical, a trait which, again, appears suitable to the purpose of the author. The analysis of how ‘we normals’ respond to discredited features and encourage the adoption of a good adjustment is cool and reasoned, but the commentary on this ...

This is a preview of the whole essay