Managing the Emotions of Reading Goffman: Erving Goffman and Spencer Cahill Looking at Disability

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to highlight both the value and critiques of Erving Goffman’s conceptualization of stigma as well as the emotion work needed to learn the lessons it has to teach.

Methodology/approach

I use a personal narrative grounded in my experience as a member of the “wise” category (the mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy) and observations of the reactions of my disabled students as a vehicle for taking the reader inside the experience of the trials and tribulations of reading Goffman as a member of “marked” social categories and the more humanizing experience of reading Spencer Cahill’s work.

Findings

There remains much to be learned from reading Goffman’s Stigma. In many ways his work has set the stage for approaches to the study of disability that we are still discovering. Learning these lessons through is made difficult by the de-humanizing perspective Goffman brings to the work. He clearly locates himself and his readers in the category of “we the normals” who see the stigmatized as “not quite fully human.” For disabled students and scholars and their families, reading Goffman requires a good deal of emotion management. Reading Spencer Cahill’s work can help in that process. Goffman presents disabled students and scholars and their family members with confirmation of what we know to be true about our marked and not quite human status in the eyes of others and in the process gives us our “own.” Cahill helps us all see ourselves in the strangeness that is inside social life. There is great value in both.

Citation

Green, S.E. (2016), "Managing the Emotions of Reading Goffman: Erving Goffman and Spencer Cahill Looking at Disability", Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know it (Research in Social Science and Disability, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 39-56. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-354720160000009005