Stereotypes

A stereotype is a social construct, a textually based assertion of what a given type of individual [Page 789]should be. A stereotype is also a representation. Whenever something is represented, something is always left out of the account, and this discontinuity is central to the meanings we derive; however, a stereotype leaves so much out of the account it operates more as a fiction than a reliable portrayal of an identity. The discontinuity in a representation leads to a desirousness to retrieve lost reality and to fill in what has been left out of the account, resulting both in readings that occur despite what has been left out of the account, and in misreadings because of what has been left out of the account. The more left out, the greater the scope of possible misreadings and the more likely the emergence of stereotyped understandings and oversimplifications based on the preponderance of absences. Stereotypes hew closely only to the most obvious regularities and irregularities of human body type and behavior.

Stereotypes are literary- and image-based texts based on sensory data, typifying and creating narratives of identity around harshly delimited sets of identity markers to stigmatize some and normalize others. Constituted thusly, a typecasting of sensory impressions can represent the whole panoply of stigmatizing social stories and mythologies with which it has been qualitatively associated. Normality itself is a social construct, comprising stereotypes and confirmed by contrasting stereotypes. A norm is constructed systematically, organizing only the most apparent and atypical textualizable regularities of human bodies and behaviors to make problematic any traits that do not coalesce in uniformity with those textual identifiers constructed as central to prevailing social hierarchies.

Stereotyping constructs some to be ugly, some to be beautiful, some to be heroes, and some to be monstersoversimplifications rendered as texts that secure and extend a base of power and influence in social arenas. Regimes of influence that shape social identities and individual behavior employ stereotypes to caricature one group of people as insignificant, foolish, or dangerous in the eyes of another group of people. Dominant groups stereotype those they oppress; marginalized groups also stereotype those who dominate them; however, dominant groups also possess the means to institutionalize their stereotypic representations through the various media of mass communications.

In Western scientific discourse, one invariably encounters medians, averages, likelihoods, and patterns constructed as binary axes, polarities of understanding, normal distributions, and standard deviations. Stereotyped narratives of identity have converged with scientific discourse in several ways. The concept of establishing norms has a statistical derivation advanced amongst Western industrialists during the early 1800s. Adolphe Quetelet elaborated a conception of the “average man” with the bourgeoisie standing in at the mean position of a rational order of things. Quetelet believed that any middle-class individual epitomizing all the qualities of the average human was also invested with all the purported greatness, beauty and goodness imagined to be present at the center of society.

Within the dispensation of a rule of averages, this implies that the norm must somehow comprise the majority of the population. In a society where, for instance, the concept of “able-bodiedness” as a norm is in operation, the desirability of normalcy is further entrenched if every deviating or limited body is made problematic as a societal defect and marginalized as a repository for social angst and uncertainty. Public opinion and common sense can, however, generate a tyranny of normalcy when averages are corporealized through the media as stereotypes of desirability, while differences are measured either as natural deviations from the desirable, or as tragically acquired disabilities that cripple conformity to agreed constructs of beauty and well-being.

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