The Good, the Bad and the Homo: On "Others" and Discriminations

If the individual life is an empty piece of paper, at its beginning, than no one, except the owner, has right of sketching it. While today the majority of humans agree on that by accepting democracy as a way of living in modern era, the people who have doing “different” than others are being pushed aside from the society. Goffman referred it as “stigma”; immediate discrediting and “absolute” re-identification with your “deviancies”. But why this happens in a way that it does? Freud puts it the argument that, civilization (Kultur) has discontents, which I agree. We are coming together in order to survive and benefit from each other, and many times those who wants to benefit more stigmatizes the “others” –no matter who they are, what they are, where they are.

In my opinion, there is nothing worse and inhuman than labeling individuals’ life only from a single dimension and obligating them to live according to the frames of their labels and seeing it as “natural”, if we speak about modern democratic way of living. I would have been chosen to be a homosexual, but that would be only one single thing in my whole life. I am still a leftist sociology student living in Turkey who likes to make trips around world, occasionally speaks about politics, and hates fruit cakes. It is my freedom to identify myself with any of these characteristics of mine because these are my choices; they are not dictated to me. It is these choices and their positioning and organizing in the social life what we call as “self” or identity. Then how do we become our choices?

In terms of sexuality, if it develops as we socialize, then there many of “choices” that is to say, it is not because I thought being straight would be fun, but my decision went through a process; therefore has its own dynamism as we internalize them. However, when these choices are vastly unaccepted and over-problematized, than the real essence of the action within our choices disappears and substitutes with the manifestations of “existence” and respect. Then our identification becomes the matter of politics. For Weeks, this is “strange”.

It is already so strange to carry weapons to “protect” your privacy in your neighborhood and keep people away from your property, while you meant to live in a society to benefit from civilization. Also, killing three women per day is strange, seeing homosexuals as “defected” is strange, ruling a country for generations arbitrarily is strange, making war overseas in the name of brining democracy is strange and making IQ test for the ones who wants citizenship from your country is strange in order to benefit from civilization. But the real strangeness lies here: these all are products and dictates of patriarchy which gives us bad faiths about many people.

Self, Mind, Hitler, Society: Goffman's Stigma

The personality of the individuals and their unique selves are often constituted by the society, for many sociologists. Therefore, individuals, since they know the rules of the “game”, adjust their personality to the society in order to live together. Yet, this process of adjustment is a quest to create “ideal-types” in the society, then, the ones who do not success (willingly or unwillingly) in this process are stigmatized. Since, all of our actions, beliefs and roles are being judged according to the “perfectly, correctly construction” principle (the perfectness and correctness are defined according to the “dynamic” norms of the society), ones having mental, physical or ethno-religious differences are stigmatized. The reaction of others to these “deviations” destroys the normal identity of stigmatized person and because the reaction is received repeatedly it is considered as a process –just like the self–.

Michel Foucault’s bio-power seemed to me very connected to this idea of stigma. Industrial capitalism brought “efficiency” to our life as a main target to achieve. In this respect, standard, controllable, productive and consumer individuals have been “normalized” by the bio-power. For instance, for many nations “long-living, white, ‘protestant’, middle class man” is a model in their discourses. This legitimizes the disapproval or marginalization of any other persons who do not fit in these criteria.

In my opinion, the Holocaust was the ultimate form of stigma; millions of people killed because of being “different” than Aryan race, and millions more were killed being “not proper” Aryan. But, this article shows something beyond this unfortunate illustration, that is; all societies do actually have some “Hitler feelings” and will of stigmatizing. Two lessons we should learn from stigma, bio-power and Holocaust: first; we always have to look at what and who is behind the “normative, normal, and ideal”. Second; individuals have the same power as the ones who constituted “normal”, each individual can resist unless there is full and absolute control among them.