Stigma In Erving Goffman's Carnival Of The Grotesque

Stigma is a term originated by the Greeks to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. Erving Goffman, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Monaghan all study and discuss the emergence of stigma from symbolic interactions, and explains how people come to possess a deviant identity and manage across various social contexts. Erving Goffman highlights the degrading and discrediting aspects of stigma, and suggests that many experience a “social death,” internalizing the shame, as they attempt to “manage” their “spoiled identities.” On the other hand, Mikhail Bakhtin provides an alternative response to stigma, and his concept “carnival of the grotesque” suggests a “re-presenting” of body deviance

We have learned through sociologist such as Anderson that stigma is a the result of a social process that links a trait or characteristics with a stereotype. Not only does these stereotypes maintain boundaries between “normal” and “deviant,” they also maintain hierarchies, power disparate relationships, and promote discrimination. There is a clear discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity, a discrepancy between what we perceive someone as and who that person really is. According to Goffman, there are discredited and discreditable stigma. Discredited individuals have a stigma that is visible such as race/ethnicity, gender, physical disability, gender nonconforming, etc...On the other hand, discreditable individuals have a stigma that is largely

And Others, explains to us how people come to possess a deviant identity and how they manage across various social contexts. Many groups participate in carnival like events to celebrate their identities and use the different spaces as an act/form of resistant. However, these spaces have limitations. Many of these celebrations are temporary and mere fantasy. While online spaces allow these men to “become “virtually” acceptable, admirable, and even sexually desirable,” it doesn’t negate the fact that we do live in a somatic society where these individuals will continue to be stigmatized. Regarding to the documentary, one of the best quote that I can fully explain the limitations of carnival is, “the ballroom tells me that I’m somebody, but when the ballroom is over, you come home, you have to convince yourself that you are somebody.” Many of those that leave the ballroom, recognize that they still have to hide their identities (stay in the closet), and they have to give the society what they want to see to avoid prejudice, so they won’t be question about their lifestyle. As those in the documentary would say, “the ‘realness’ queens are those who can walk out of the ballroom and into the daylight and can come back with all their clothes and no