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What is Deviance?

The objective of this short book is to spark your deviant imagination in the way that University of Kent Professor Steve Box sparked mine. Let's start by reflecting on my own working-class South London life, which was vibrant with deviant insights resulting from street life and its characters, bad-ass reputations, and damaged "sicko" identities. These were not only barriers that had nearly stopped me from going to university but nuggets of social life through which I would earn a doctorate in deviant behavior! What an astounding revelation to a twenty-year-old from a council flat (in the United States, this is equivalent to "the projects") who hadn't even believed it possible to get a bachelor's degree, and who had so disappointed his father for abandoning that £5-a-week ($6.60) apprenticeship (equivalent to $50 a week in 2017) with Decca in favor of unproductive "book learning." Of course, at the time, I had no idea these were valuable experiences. To me they were bad experiences - things to bury, cover up and deny. It took Steve Box to awaken my deviant imagination to the mother lode of riches I had buried and which many other students had not. To me they were embarrassing - a lifestyle I was trying to escape by going to college, and a cluster of nightmares that cast doubt on whether I was simply a college fraud, to be revealed when my delinquent past came out.

Steve was not an easy professor to know. But you couldn't be around him without being charged with questions about why things were the way they seemed. Despite his own academic success, this fellow working-class Londoner never lost sight of his working-class roots. But where we start isn't where we must end. As a working-class South London friend once commented: "Back when I knew you, Stuart, you didn't have two words to rub together!" Where I come from, that would be a compliment, wrapped in envy with a ribbon of resentment.

Let's now take a journey in the daily life of contemporary American student Megan Nesbeth as she becomes aware of deviance in the world around her through taking a sociology class. She says that, after taking sociology, "everything, even 'mundane shit,' calls for analysis." I agree. She entitles the piece "To be average is to be deviant":

Deviance is at its core a social construction that is used to maintain social order. The "normal" draw lines for the population to follow. As a society we pay homage to these lines and experience anxiety when they are crossed. We hold the categories that we have created as holy and respect them as naturally occurring phenomena that have always been drawn in stone as a guide for behavior. We act as if race and social class created themselves as organizational blocks of what people should expect in life. We act as if child brides were never a Western phenomenon and as if Ashton and Demi, now that they have been validated by the media, are the first couple to ever have such a large age gap in their relationship. We pretend that on the day that a person turns twenty-one their brain is suddenly extremely less susceptible to the damages of alcohol . and significantly more mature to make decisions about drinking.

9:00 a.m. Get to the gym. Put my iPod on and get on elliptical machine. Read some Catcher in the Rye while on the elliptical. Secretly think I am Holden Caufield at heart. I would argue that, if we had never invented deviance, secrets wouldn't exist, and if we think about how silly most secrets are our continual need to label people as deviant seems a bit silly too. A secret is just a secret because someone decided that whatever is being kept secret is unacceptable public behavior or knowledge. What's so different between secrets and deviance?

10:30 a.m. Walk back from the gym. Call mom. Ask again about taking time off from school. She tells me that time off is only for people who are screwing up or get pregnant or go crazy or . I drop the argument. I always drop the argument, partly because, even though I think that the American model of formal education leads to widespread and excessive burn out which I often experience, college isn't that bad, and I have been conditioned to be here for four years. Besides I would much rather be controlled through the apparatuses of civil society than those of the state . Of course, there are a range of other possibilities such as not attending college at all, attending a two-year college, attending college part-time while working, and taking time off during college. Each of these options is marked by race, class, gender, nationality, geography, and other increasingly multitudinous social factors. These factors combine to create different potential responses along a continuum of stigma and acceptance for the same decision made by different people. Whether they admit it or not there is a way in which as a black female I am already the discredited, so my parents worry about me playing with the things that make me the discreditable. Maybe I worry about it too, but not as much.

11:00 a.m. Psychology class. Praise the American Psychiatric Association a little for perfecting social control through the DSM.

12:15 p.m. Lunch. Absolutely hate lunch at this time because it's so crowded. It makes me feel institutionalized.

1:30 p.m. Deviance and Social Order class. Professor is being deviant again - you know, flexible and understanding. Reasonable. Okay, professors aren't bad in general.

2:45 p.m. Lit Theory class. All of the theorists that we are reading were considered deviant in their times. I'm surprised that more of them weren't hung or put on house arrest or something. Jaywalk on my way back to my dorm. A driver angrily shakes his hand at me. Deviance is always relative. What is acceptable in one era is reprehensible in another. What is okay in the city is punishable on the farm.

4:30 p.m. Go back to room. Check in with friends. Turn on computer. Check email and Facebook. Watch funny video on the homepage of Slate Magazine, a respectable, but entertaining on-line magazine. Do some homework. Think about the fact that paying a lot of money for the privilege of working really hard to the end of working really hard for the rest of your life is unnatural.

6:00 p.m. Dinner. Partake in the Middlebury two-bowl dinner ritual: Make dinner i.e. a salad and throw on some dressing and use the second bowl to shake it. I like doing it because I think it looks cool like when someone makes me a tossed salad at a deli and it spreads the dressing well. My friends give me the look. I remind them that I'm going to get other food too.

7:00 p.m. Do some more homework. Feel a little bit depressed; wonder if I need Zoloft.

10:00 p.m. Hang out with friends. Spike some cider, because drinking on week-nights is more acceptable in college and during certain parts of the year. We call it a holiday party so it's okay. Watch some Mean Girls and The Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Someone brings up pole dancing . wish the classes were cheaper. The entertainment industry should praise daily the constructions of normalcy and deviance. Most entertainment especially in terms of movies and television are based on deviance in that they either draw strength from their universality, that is the way in which everyone can relate and is the same because the experience depicted is expected; normal, or they draw off of the attraction to that which falls somewhere other than on the list of what is normal, accepted, or expected; deviant. Even in terms of activities people always want to try things that seem risqué, whether it's bungee jumping or pole dancing, both of which have become increasingly popular over the years. In the case of pole dancing the activity's transformation from something meant only for strippers to something for average women to do for exercise and to feel sexy reads as similar to the re-appropriation of negative words that has always been common with disenfranchised groups.

1:00 a.m. Sleep.

We live through our transgressions. In my eyes life is most invigorating when we're breaking the rules. I don't care what you call it - deviant behavior, secrets or crime - we all deviate. Picking up where Erickson left off, I would claim that deviance is necessary not only for the maintenance of the society, but also the enrichment of the individual. If establishing laws is a way for the "authorities" in a society to claim phallic power for themselves, purposeful deviance is an assertion of agency and a claim to phallic power on an individual level. Of course, not all deviance is planned since deviance only becomes deviance once enough people with power label it as such, but the existence of "deviance" is what allows us to live in a world in which we're not all like-minded cyborgs. (Nesbeth, 2008: reproduced with permission)

To study deviance is to study uncertainty. Students of deviance are looking at society's edge. That is the edge beyond social order. Deviance here is defined as disorder - not normal, not acceptable. Whose edge or what edge, whose order and whose disorder, and why it is even an edge of order and disorder - all are uncertainties to be discovered by students of deviance. Deviance encompasses a wide range of behaviors, demeanors, identities, appearances, styles, attitudes, and beliefs. This is because what's deviant varies between...