SC2027
Sociology of Health Illness and the Body

Goffman’s thesis on the ‘stigmatized body’

Word Count: 1,967

Using two contemporary examples, explore Goffman’s thesis on the ‘stigmatized body’.
The ancient Greeks used stigma to refer to a fault used to expose something unusual about a person’s moral status, a person bearing this stigma would often be described as a blemished person, ritually polluted, and to be avoided, especially in public places. Christians later divided the metaphor into two separate aspects; the bodily signs of holy grace and the medical allusion, which refers to the bodily sigs of physical disorder. Today the term is described using the original literal sense. (E., Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 1990)Erving Goffman describes stigma as “the process by which the reaction of other’s spoils normal identity (Nettleton, 2006). The three forms of stigma recognised by Goffman are; mental illness, a physical form of deformity or an association with a particular race, religion or belief. (E., Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 1990). Sociologist, Gerhard Falk defines stigma based on two categories; existential stigma and achieved stigma. He describes existential stigma as “a stigma deriving from a condition which the target of the stigma either did not cause or over which he has little control”. He describes achieved stigma as “stigma that is earned because of conduct and/or because they contributed heavily to attaining the stigma in question.” (Falk, 2001). The two stigmatized bodies that I will discuss are; the transsexual body and the immigrant body.

The Trans-sexual Body
The transsexual condition is often described as a situation where the self is trapped in the wrong body. Harry Benjamin, a German born endocrinologist, whose work focuses primarily on transsexuality defined it as an error