Hegemony

Hegemony refers to the complete dominance of one group by another and affects how society understands crime, deviance, class, race, and gender. The concept of hegemony can be applied to many different domains of power, such as economic, political, and cultural authority. Cultural hegemony is often considered the most important, but least observable, form of hegemony because it means that one group is able to shape how an entire society perceives and discusses social problems. The words used to label different actions and individuals reflect imbalances in power. Hegemony is often considered a Marxist concept because it focuses on how economic elites exert power across multiple domains. For criminologists and deviance researchers, hegemony affects how laws, activities, and subpopulations are perceived.

Societies are based on a common consensus regarding what is considered good or bad, normal or taboo, and deviant or conventional. These shared definitions must be supported by the larger social ideology to be considered legitimate. Powerless people rarely make laws or decide what constitutes normal behavior. Instead, social norms reflect the interests of political elites. Discourse, or the framing of how certain laws, behaviors, and populations are presented to the public, acts as an invisible form of power that begins shortly after birth. Education, religion, and mass media all support dominant discourse by legitimizing elite ideology. The Italian political and social theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) stated that the ultimate signifier of hegemony is when all members of a society use dominant words to describe the status of the oppressed, because it indicates that elite power and ideology have become normalized. Hegemony is constantly reproduced by using elite ideas and definitions to describe how society views class, race, and gender.