The Politics of Deviance

by Hendershott, Anne B.

• ISBN13: 9781893554474
• ISBN10: 1893554473
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-08-01
• Publisher: Encounter Books

Summary

Until the 1960s, sociologists had asserted that a willingness to identify deviance, or what constitutes appropriate behaviour, was indispensable to the process of generating and sustaining cultural values, clarifying moral boundaries, and promoting social solidarity. Yet today, after three decades of lacerating debate, shifts in values and social relations, and questioning social authority, the subject has virtually disappeared from sociology's radar screen. Here, a leading sociologist tries to understand how this major change in the way we see our world occurred. How did we adopt such different views of human nature and personal responsibility? How did we 'medicalise' what was once proscribed behaviour? While in the past there was a moral consensus that conditioned our attitudes toward teenage sex, suicide, substance abuse, and other questionable behaviours, Hendershott points out that today it is pressure groups that define and redefine deviance. Arguing against the grain of her own discipline, the author asserts the value and strength of the most important of all determinants of behaviour -- social norms and the commitment to accept them.

Author Biography

Anne Hendershott is a professor of sociology at the University of San Diego.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(11)
Medicalizing the Deviance of Drug Abuse	12	(19)
Removing the Stigma from Mental Illness	31	(16)
Expanding the Market for Mental Illness	47	(17)
Moral Panics and the Social Construction of Deviance	64	(18)
Postmodern Pedophilia	82	(11)
Stigma and Sexual Orientation	93	(16)
Celebrating the Sexually Adventurous Adolescent	109	(13)
Rape, Real and Imagined	122	(13)
A Death of One's Own	135	(18)
The Language of Deviance	153	(11)
Acknowledgments	164	(1)
Notes	165	(20)
Index	185