Deviance

Deviance was originally conceived as sin. The moral control of sinfulness is captured in Kai Erikson's classic book Wayward Puritans about the Salem witchcraft trials in 17th-century Massachusetts. Erikson showed that deviance was as much about the behaviors of the labelers of deviance, and an expression of their fears and concerns, as it was about the behavior designated deviant and subsequently demonized. As Stephen Pfohl has argued, this demonic perspective reveals that the control of deviance is a battle between good and evil over “who gets to name the good and control the bad,” and “deviance is, and always has been, a moral battle in which the winners are declared saints and the losers, sinners.” The study of deviance is distinct in dealing with challenges to societies' institutions and social processes that seek to develop an ordered collective society or community.

The sociology of deviance addresses how mainstream or powerful groups within society deal with those whose behavior exists on its margins; the functional or dysfunctional role these behaviors, individuals, and groups play, and their perceived threat to social order; and what to do about both deviants and deviance. In contrast, critics challenge the legitimacy and authority of [Page 262]those who use their power to define normality and to marginalize and stigmatize others through mechanisms of social control used in the name of maintaining order.

The modern-day study of deviance emerged in the 1960s amid the civil rights movement, women's movement, and the protests to end the Vietnam War. These movements began to describe, then to celebrate human differences and marginalized voices. Howard Becker's Outsiders was a landmark sociological contribution that reversed the gaze from a focus on deviant actors and what could be wrong with them, to a focus on the audience that defines some people's behavior as deviant. He famously stated that “deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to the ‘offender.’ The deviant is one to whom the label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label.” As a consequence, what counts as deviance varies historically, culturally, and situationally as time, cultures, and contexts vary in what they define as normal and acceptable and, therefore, what they count as deviant and unacceptable.