Goffman Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

1963 by Simon 8c Schuster, Inc.From the author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Stigma is analyzes a person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to people whom society calls “normal.”
Stigma is an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their image of themselves must daily confront and be affronted by the image which others reflect back to them.
Drawing extensively on autobiographies and case studies, sociologist Erving Goffman analyzes the stigmatized person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to “normals” He explores the variety of strategies stigmatized individuals employ to deal with the rejection of others, and the complex sorts of information about themselves they project. In Stigma the interplay of alternatives the stigmatized individual must face every day is brilliantly examined by one of America’s leading social analysts.Stigma and Social Identity
Preliminary Conceptions
The Own and the Wise
Moral Career
Information Control and Personal Identity
The Discredited and the Discreditable
Social Information
Visibility
Personal Identity
Biography
Biographical Others
Passing
Techniques of Information Control
Covering
Group Alignment and Ego Identity
Ambivalence
Professional Presentations
In Group Alignments
Out-Group Alignments
The Politics of Identity
The Self and Its Other
Deviations and Norms
The Normal Deviant
Stigma and Reality
Deviations and Deviance
About the Author