„Das Geschlecht, nicht die Religion, ist das Opium des Volkes.“
— Erving Goffman
zitiert in "das baugerüst 4/03 gender mainstreaming" - Ulrike Hormel, Albert Scherr: Beobachtungen im Geschlechtertheater. 2003
Zitate von Erving Goffman
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Erving Goffman
Geburtstag:11. Juni 1922
Todesdatum:19. November 1982
Zitate Erving Goffman
„The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us; at the same time he must keep himself at that remove from us which assures our painlessly being able to confirm this belief about him. Put differently, he is advised to reciprocate naturally with an acceptance of himself and us, an acceptance of him that we have not quite extended to him in the first place. A PHANTOM ACCEPTANCE is thus allowed to provide the base for a PHANTOM NORMALCY.“
— Erving Goffman
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
„... the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.“
— Erving Goffman
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
„Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the anxiety consequent upon this perception of oneself, and the strategies devised to reduce this anxiety, are not a product of abnormal psychology, but would be exhibited by any person socialized into our culture who came to conceive of himself as someone losing his mind.“
— Erving Goffman
Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates
„Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest.“
— Erving Goffman
Interaction Ritual - Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior
„In our society, defecation involves an
individual in activity which is defined as inconsistent with
the cleanliness and purity standards expressed in many of our
performances. Such activity also causes the individual to
disarrange his clothing and to 'go out of play," that is, to
drop from his face the expressive mask that he employs in
face-to-face interaction. At the same time ic becomes difficult
for him to reassemble his personal front should the need to
enter into interaction suddenly occur. Perhaps that is a
reason why toilet doors in our society have locks on them.“
— Erving Goffman
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
„By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class.“
— Erving Goffman
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
„At the same time, minor failings or incidental impropriety may, he feels, be interpreted as a direct expression of his stigmatized differentness. Ex-mental patients, for example, are sometimes afraid to engage in sharp interchanges with spouse or employer because of what a show of emotion might be taken as a sign of. Mental defectives face a similar contingency: It also happens that if a person of low intellectual ability gets into some sort of trouble the difficulty is more or less automatically attributed to “mental defect” whereas if a person of “normal intelligence” gets into a similar difficulty, it is not regarded as symptomatic of anything in particular.31“
— Erving Goffman
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
„As already suggested, when the individual first learns who it is that he must now accept a his own, he is likely, at the very least, to feel some ambivalence; for these others will not only be patently stigmatized, and thus not like the normal person he knows himself to be, but ma also have other attributes with which he finds it difficult to associate himself. What may end up as a freemasonry may begin with a shudder. A newly blind girl on a visit to The Lighthouse [probably the Chicago Lighthouse, one of the oldest social service agencies in Chicago serving the blind or visually impaired] directly from leaving the hospital provides an illustration:
„My questions about a guide dog were politely turned aside. Another sighted worker took me in tow to show me around. We visited the Braille library; the classrooms; the clubrooms where the blind members of the music and dramatic groups meet; the recreation hall where on festive occasion the blind play together; the cafeteria, where all the blind gather to eat together; the huge workshops where the blind earn a subsistence income by making mops and brooms, weaving rugs, caning chairs. As we moved from room to room, I could hear the shuffling of feet, the muted voices, the tap-tap-tapping of canes. Here was the safe, segregated world of the sightless — a completely different world, I was assured by the social worker, from the one I had just left….
I was expected to join this world. To give up my profession and to earn my living making mops. The Lighthouse would be happy to teach me how to make mops. I was to spend the rest of my life making mops with other blind people, eating with other blind people, dancing with other blind people. I became nauseated with fear, as the picture grew in my mind. Never had I come upon such destructive segregation.“ (p.37)“
— Erving Goffman
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
