Blog Post Two: My Own Deviancy

Within my own life, it is rare that I feel deviant: I’m a heterosexual, white, middle-class female without a criminal history. The most deviant characteristic about myself comes from a personal association, not one of my own actions: I have a gay father. Even though this characteristic is not (in my opinion) obvious, it aligns with the sociological premises of labeling theory and shaming theory.

The label of having a gay parent comes with assumptions that relate to Howard S. Becker’s labeling theory. Labeling theory claims “that social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders” (Thio, Calhoun, Conyers 39). Because of an assumed heterosexuality in America, homosexuals are repeatedly labeled as outsiders. My father is a “rule breaker” due to a personal characteristic, not a personal action (39). Becker notes that not everyone who is labeled deviant has necessarily “broken a rule” (39), which is where my personal deviance comes into play. Even though this characteristic does not often marginalize me, I too am labeled as an outsider because I am in the minority in society as the daughter of a gay man. 

I do not go around telling people my dad is gay, nor do I hide it; I reveal it when it seems appropriate. Once I do, I find that people make assumptions about me that are sometimes true, and sometimes not true. These associations relate to the “public identity” aspect of labeling theory, which assumes that a how society views a person changes when they have been revealed as a deviant (40). I find that most of my friends, for example, do not use “gay” as a negative adjective in front of me, but I have overheard them say it to other people; they see my “public identity” as a gay man’s daughter, and thus they assume that these words bother me. However, this is false because the phrases do not offend me, therefore that part of the public identity is untrue for me. Another assumed identity that comes with being related to someone gay is that they are politically liberal. This aspect of my public identity is generally true. Thus, people are viewed differently once they are deemed different and therefore deviant.

Digital image. Equity Foundation. Web. 5 Feb. 2012. <http://www.equityfoundation.org/what-we-do/pride-event-sponsorship>.

I see some aspects of John Braithwaite’s shaming theory also present in the deviancy of having a gay father. Although the gay community has moved forward politically over the last thirty years, there is still a “stigmatization” (33) regarding gays and people associated with them.

Stigmatization, also called disintegrative shaming, “divides the community by creating a class of outcasts” (33). The converse to stigmatization is reintegrative shaming, which aims to reintroduce “the offender back into the community of law-abiding or respectable citizens” usually through informal means (34). I do not feel that I have necessarily been marginalized as being the daughter of a gay man, although I have witnessed this disintegration within the “outcast” group of the gay community. Being my father’s daughter has given me an interesting outlook on society, as I am able to sit comfortably at gay pride parades with my dad and his friends, yet I can also sit comfortably outside of the gay community with the label of a heterosexual. In this sense, I am witness to the stigmatization, although I am not always directly stigmatized.

To experience a similar stigmatization of the gay community, my sociological experiment was fairly simple: I held the hand of a female friend of mine for one hour in two locations to give that illusion that we were two girls dating. In Robert K. Merton’s “Strain Theory,” he discusses crime in relation to cultural goals and institutional norms (21-26). American society’s assumption of heterosexuality is a norm that is broken in this experiment. Merton claims that norms work to secure “desired values” in a society (21). 

While holding my friends’ hand, I felt fairly awkward for a couple reasons. It felt strange to do something I knew was against the norm, so the anticipation made me feel self-conscious. The second reason I felt awkward was because I am straight and I am not familiar with holding a fellow woman’s hand. I was able to get over this aspect of it fairly quickly, however.

We first held hands at a local neighborhood park while we walked around the concrete track a few times. There were a two groups of teenagers there, as well as a couple families. It appeared that all of them looked at us at one point or another in the same sequence: They’d first look at our faces, then down at our hands, then back at our faces again, as if they were surprised to see two young women holding hands. Whenever this happened, I felt myself turn slightly embarrassed yet prideful, because I was working against the norm. No one at the park attempted to talk to us, although we were not conducting any activities that would require them to do so.

Digital image. The Telegraph. News Limited, 17 Feb. 2011. Web. 5 Feb. 2012. <http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/historic-parental-win-for-lesbian/story-e6freuzi-1226007191902>.

We had nearly identical reactions at our second location, Safeway. Because people at Safeway were more engrossed in their shopping than people doing things at the park, we didn’t get as many people looking at us. People that did, however, did generally had the same sequence of looking at us (faces-hands-faces) as others at the park. Most people smiled politely at us at Safeway, while others looked at our hands then turned away casually. We had no instances of people being rude because we broke the norm. I felt more comfortable holding hands at Safeway than at the park, perhaps because it is less of a family atmosphere and it is a more casual setting. This experiment gave me an opportunity to see how it feels to be a “deviant” homosexual; a role that my father takes on in his everyday life.

Word count: 979

Works Cited

Thio, Alex, Thomas C. Calhoun, and Addrain Conyers. Readings in Deviant Behavior. 6th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2010. Print.