Stigma is a concept systematized by Erving Goffman in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Goffman defined stigma as a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype: a deeply discrediting gap between a person’s “virtual social identity” (what others expect them to be) and their “actual social identity” (what they are or are perceived to be). Stigma is not a property of a person or an attribute but a relationship between persons produced in social interaction.
Goffman distinguished three types: stigma of the body (physical deformity, disability), stigma of character (mental illness, addiction, criminal record, sexual deviance), and tribal stigma (race, nation, religion). The third type is transmitted through lineage and can contaminate all members of a family. For each type, the central problem is the same: the management of information about the discrediting attribute. The discredited person is one whose stigma is already known; the discreditable person is one whose stigma is not yet visible and who must manage its potential disclosure. This distinction maps directly onto the closet: the closeted person is discreditable, managing the potential revelation of a stigmatized identity.
Stigma matters for queer theory because the modern categories of sexual identity were produced through stigmatization. Michel Foucault argued that “the homosexual” as a social type was created in the nineteenth century through medical and legal discourse — that before this, there were homosexual acts but not a homosexual identity. Goffman’s framework helps explain how this identity, once produced, is managed: through passing, covering, disclosure, identity politics, and the formation of stigmatized communities that provide alternative sources of recognition. The gay rights movement can be read as a sustained effort to manage or remove stigma; queer theory asks whether the framework of stigma management — with its implicit goal of normalization — is the right framework at all, or whether it concedes too much to the normative order that produced the stigma.
Goffman’s analysis is sociological rather than critical: it describes how stigma operates without theorizing the power structures that produce it. Queer theory, queer-of-color critique, and disability studies have extended the analysis by asking whose norms define what counts as discrediting, how those norms are maintained, and what it would mean to refuse the framework of normal and deviant rather than seeking admission to the normal.
Related terms
- Erving Goffman — who systematizes the concept
- The closet — the epistemological structure through which sexual stigma is managed
- Heteronormativity — the normative framework that produces sexual stigma
- Homonormativity — the strategy of managing stigma through assimilation to normative structures
- Queer negativity — the refusal to manage stigma on the normative order’s terms