Stigma is a corrosive social force by which individuals and communities throughout history have been systematically dehumanised, scapegoated and oppressed. From the literal stigmatizing (tattooing) of criminals in ancient Greece, to modern day discrimination against Muslims, refugees and the 'undeserving poor', stigma has long been a means of securing the interests of powerful elites.
In this radical reconceptualisation Tyler precisely and passionately outlines the political function of stigma as an instrument of state coercion. Through an original social and economic reframing of the history of stigma, Tyler reveals stigma as a political practice, illuminating previously forgotten histories of resistance against stigmatization, boldly arguing that these histories provide invaluable insights for understanding the rise of authoritarian forms of government today.
Author(s): Imogen Tyler
Edition: 1
Publisher: Zed Books
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 288
Cover
Half Title
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of illustrations
Introduction: stigma, the machinery of inequality
A vigorous and relentless assault upon human dignity
What is stigma?
A mark made upon the skin by burning with a hot iron
The coining of blood into capital
Letters of blood and fire
Stigma power
Neoliberal stigma power – looking up
Genealogies of stigma power – looking back
Stigma and racism
Decolonising stigma
Borders, walls and fences
The political economy of stigma
Fighting shame
1. The penal tattoo
Stigma as inscription
The ancient penal history of stigma
Capturing labour
Threads of racism
Misogyny and stigma
‘Muzzled like dogs and paraded through the streets’
Branking in the twenty-first century
Slave masks
The changing meanings of tattoos
The enclosure of land
Enclosure propagandists
Branding the vagabond, badging the poor
Bentham’s panoptical welfare stigma machine
The enclosure of the poor
Colonise at home
‘Flogged, fettered and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty’
The cotton that connects, the cloth that binds
Eugenic epistemologies of tattooing
Penal stigma in India
The stigma of genetic criminality
Indian democracy
The stigma machine of caste
Hindu supremacy
Connected histories of stigma power
2. From stigma power to black power
Struggles in the interaction order
Social relations without power relations
The erasure of the history of penal stigma
Atrocity tales: Goffman’s methods
The stigma of disability
Professor normal
‘A black boy hacked into a murderous lesson’
Stigma as struggle
Stigma after Goffman
3. The stigma machine of the border
Scene one: Břeclav railway station, Břeclav, South Moravia, Czechia, 1 September 2015
‘Migrants are like cockroaches’
Europe’s racist crisis
‘A genocide against white people’
‘No camp, no camp’
Genealogies of racism in Europe
Fascism as a connecting thread
The stigma machine of fascism
Public humiliation and pillory
The death of the scaffold?
The return of shame sanctions
Tipping back into authoritarianism
‘A gigantic wave of racist state propaganda’
Fascism online: transnational racist responses to Břeclav
Scene two: Břlá-Jezová immigration detention centre, Czechia, 31 August 2015
Spectres of fascism
Scene three: Břeclav train station, 11 March 1938
4. The stigma machine of austerity
The austerity state
Austerity as enclosure
‘The political violence of the state is becoming normalised’
Unseeing austerity
Seeing austerity
Austerity in my own life
Actively disabling people
The uneven geography of austerity
‘We are completely beaten down by being dehumanised’
Welfare stigma as a rationing device
Neoliberal welfare stigma
‘Bring back the welfare stigma’
The war on welfare
Benefits broods
‘To you we’re just human waste’
‘One constant cycle of judgement’
Welfare disinheritance
The unsettling of the welfare settlement
Ashton Hall, Lancaster Town Hall 1909
Resisting the new enclosures
5. Shame lives on the eyelids
Mob cap and pinny
The facade of the English pastoral
Moving away
People like you
Shameless defiance
Class shame
Being the anthropological object
Telling practices
Speaking back
Sociological imagination
6. Conclusion: rage against the stigma machines
‘Hands off our stories’
The political economy of stigma
Neoliberalism makes you sick
Following the stigma money
Penal stigma in the colony
This work of civilisation is an enormous and continual butchery
Stigma machines
Machine breaking
Freedom movements
The new machine politics
Common humanity
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
