LAUSR

One of the critiques of the sociology of deviance has come from what Kitsuse (1980) called “tertiary deviants”–individuals andmovements objecting to their classification as deviants. In the forty years since his SSSP presidential address was published, there have been strikingly successful campaigns, such as those mounted by the disability rights and the LGBTQmovements, that have normalized differences and gained formal governmental protections. Kitsuse spoke after Roe v. Wade had decriminalized abortion, and the move to legitimize gambling under the supervision of the “gaming industry” had begun. Although disability, homosexuality, abortion, and gambling once were covered in many deviance courses, it now would be considered strange, even offensive to categorize them as deviant. Today, the business press is covering the growing pains of the industry to supply legal recreationalmarijuana, calls to legalize sex work continue, and there is an active fat acceptance movement. Any of these could soon fall out of the category of deviance. What–or where–are the boundaries of deviance? This has–let’s not kid ourselves–always been a problem. Deviance, like collective behavior and social problems, is basically a course title designed to cover a set of residual topics that seemed likely to attract students (sex, drugs, and violence) and that seemed sociological, yet didn’t fit neatly into the classic, realsociology curriculum (courses on social psychology, social stratification, social organization, social change, etc.). Deviance was always a hodge-podge, given a fig-leaf of coherence by claims that whatever the course covered involved violating a norm, or was whatever people labeled deviant. And yet the concept has never been clearly defined. Howard S. Becker devoted two chapters in Outsiders (1963)–surely the most influential statement about deviance–to jazz musicians. But why exactly were jazz musicians deviant? No doubt jazz musicians saw themselves as hipper than all those squares, and probably lots of dads would have preferred that their daughters not date jazz musicians, but was there some sort of norm against being a jazz musician? Were there status degradation ceremonies in which jazz musicians were labeled? I have a shelf of old deviance textbooks. They don’t age well. Here are some of the chapter titles from the first edition of Robert R. Bell’s Social Deviance (1971):