Stigma Communication

Definitions and Background

Although one may find communication acts related to stigma throughout human history, Erving Goffman's 1963 book of the same name provided a solid foundation for stigma communication research. He argued that stigmas generate an intense form of devaluation such that a member of a stigmatized group is considered no longer human. As a result of dehumanization, communities exercise a number of discrimination choices that ultimately limit stigmatized people's quality of life and possibly their lives.

Steven Neuberg and colleagues argue that the variations one sees in stigmas throughout history and the world may be explained by one principle: Stigmas are generated toward those whose attributes or choices limit a social group's ability to function. This is considered a sociofunctional perspective.

An illustration of stigma communication may be found in investigating messages about hermaphrodites in Europe's Renaissance. During this period, many laws delineated rights and obligations for men relative to those afforded to women. A person who represented either or neither sex would confound the effective functioning of a group grounded in gender divisions. During this period, authors catalogued, labeled, and represented hermaphrodites in public displays as monsters. St. Augustine noted that monsters show the [Page 932]signs of divine judgment and punishment. The monster, therefore, chose to do something terribly wrong to deserve this punishment. This divine verdict, he argued, placed the monster and his or her associated community in jeopardy of enduring further divine judgment, and communities should take steps to eliminate such threats.

A person's sexual organs are not typically displayed in public. Thus, it is possible to conceal one's sexual organs in attempts to pass within society. A person may decide to conceal any anomalous features to avoid community action, such as legal proceedings to decide his or her sex. Proceedings label someone publicly and generate enforceable conditions. If someone was legally declared a male, he or she could marry, inherit, make contracts, and have burial rites according to a male status. Afterwards, this person was expected to lead life as a male: in dress, behavior, and actions. If the judgment was violated, by living as the other gender, he or she would be killed.

Stigmas, then, are social constructions that must be communicated to a community so that everyone may react appropriately, such as limiting the threatening people's access to resources and to future interactions (i.e., untouchables). Community members would need to learn how to recognize people included in the social threat, what threat they pose, and how to react to them.

Stigma Message Features

Stigma communication includes four types of content to allow such group-categorization, -recognition, -stereotyping, and -action tendencies to occur. To work most effectively, this content includes marks, labels, responsibility, and peril, and evokes three different emotions: disgust, anger, and fear. Marks are the behaviors or attributes one can use to recognize someone within a stigmatized group. A mark can be something inherent (e.g., eye color, left-hand dominance, or skin color) or affixed to a person (e.g., a tattoo or the letter A in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter). The less someone can conceal the mark, the more easily and consistently community members can recognize members of a stigmatized group. For example, the requirement that Jews in Nazi Germany wear a yellow Star of David allowed for quick and easy recognition.

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