Stigma of sexual orientation Blog #5

Stigma is define by Goffman as an attribute that discredits someone depending on the circumstances. Before it used to be a stigma to be gay, nowadays it is more acceptable depending on the place. So being gay is not a stigma in most of America and England. There is still a stigma for people to affiliate to the label of bi-sexual. It is more acceptable to be gay or lesbian because it is perceive as being define. In the other hand bi-sexuals are perceive as confused, as people who do not know what they want. There is the stigma, a bi-sexual is someone who is confused and therefore they can’t be trusted. This stigma might change depending on the place, and the community. If you are in a bi-sexual community there would be no stigma about it, but usually within a group of lesbians there would be the stigma that they just can’t make their minds and decide what they want. In the straight community being bi-sexual also depends on gender. For females it seems more acceptable, but when it comes to males there have being papers publish questioning if it is even real or possible for males to be bi-sexual. Therefore there is more of a stigma when it comes to bi-sexual males than for females.

Deviance typology Blog #4

Robert Merton’s deviance typology is very interesting. My problem with his theory is that I do not think it is possible to associate a social action to just one category. For example in the riots in England, there were people that join with a rebellion mentality. Others would take advantage of the situation which would be the people that we would refer to as following innovation. Every situation cannot comply only with one deviance. In the England riots there were people who participated with the motivation to overthrow the government. Then there were the people who were part of the riots to take advantage and gain material possessions that they would otherwise never have. This was also visible in occupy Wall Street. There were people who were there just because they thought it was fun, at one in a lifetime experience. Therefore you cannot associate one deviance typology with an event, because there are usually more than one deviance typology at play at the same time.

Blog #3 Color line and the England riots

England Riots: ‘The whites have become black’ says David Starkey. I found this video very interesting. I definitely did not agree with anything that the historian David Starkey stated. Starkey’s remarks about whites becoming black touches upon the W.E. Du Bois concept of the “color line”. In this case we would be referring mostly to the internalized attitude, Starkey believes that the people who were part of the riots had internalized “the black culture”. “The black culture” that was very confusing, in my opinion there is no such thing as a “black culture”. There are blacks all over the world, so you cannot speak of a unified black culture. Culture is shape by many factors, so it would be impossible to talk of a unified black culture. The England riots could happened again because of the ignorance of people like David Starkey who believe that the riots happened as a cultural manifestation and not as a political manifestation. This is something that happens a lot in our culture, that we take something and change the intended meaning to make it less valuable.

Gillman the Yellow wallpaper

Prior to the twentieth century, men controlled and defined women’s roles and her self-worth .Men perpetrated an ideological of Inequality that silenced and made women powerless The “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman is a great story about the repression of women in the late 1800’s but is still representative of issues faced by women today. She writes from her own personal experiences and conveys a message that sometimes in a male dominated society women suffer from the relentless power that men have over women .The Rest cure was the treatment for her depression that Dr. Weir Mitchell prescribed, which is mentioned in Gilman’s work, reflects men’s oppressive attitudes and their unwillingness to understand women emotional needs.

Franz Fanon

Franz stated that the ramification of decolonizing colonized nations would inevitable be violent, because these acquired territories was through conquest and violence. The problem with Colonizim and decolonization is the continual cycle of violence. The problem with perpetual violence it is use to solve all conflict and rule under force and fear. To heal and stabilized anyone who has been abuse, traumatized or disenfranchised is through a safe and nutrition environment . The problem that colonized counties faces is the lack of finical resource to create such a system and that where conflict resolution become limited and violence seem to be the only option.

W.E.B DU Bois

The racial Inequality is not just between Africans and Europeans, unfortunately it is a global phenomenal. The ideology of the color line is a global problem which is fuel by class consciousness or the lack of it. The color line is a barrier, created by custom, law, or economic differences, separating nonwhite from whites. Colonizim was the leading factor that created this ideology. Sadly even among disenfranchised groups there also discrimination based on the difference in skin tone. The lighter or darkness the shade of a non-white individual determines their social statues. I wonder if the role where reversed and African had enslaved European would there be a similar systematic ideology. The idea of the color line not only disenfranchised a group of people but it also distracted the rest of the population from the real problem which is the exploitation of the working class, women and children, in other words anyone who doesn’t have a wealth of powers is left to the mercy of the rich and powerful.