Introduction to Sociology / Deviance / Minjeong Lee


1. Summary

Deviance is a violation of cultural norms, divided into crime and violations of social norms. Crime is an official deviant behavior: robbery, theft, rape, murder, and assault. Violations of social norms are casual behaviors, such as picking noses or burping loudly. In Theories of Deviance, there are Psychological and Biological Explanations, Social-Strain Typology, Structural-Functionalism, Conflict Theory, Labeling Theory. And this text introduces criminal statistics and social control for gender, race, and homicide.




2. New/Interesting/Unusual things I learned

In this text, I was interested in statistics about homicide. Among them, 'Homicide rates (per 100,000 males) by age and race of victim (males only)' were the most interesting.


( Image Source : https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology/Deviance )

In the graph, the homicide rate of blacks is much higher than that of whites, and the homicide rate is the highest in the late teens to the twenties. This shows that blacks are more discriminated than whites, and younger people are more discriminated against because of race or age than older people.





3. Discussion

“Dr. Karen Halnon of Pennsylvania State University studies how some people exercise informal deviance. Her research focuses on what she calls "deviance vacations," where people of certain socioeconomic status descend to lower strata. For instance, heterosexual white males may become drag queens on the weekend. It is a vacation because heterosexual white males can afford to descend temporarily and then return to the advantages of their true socioeconomic status.”

The "deviance vacations” is said to mean that people of certain socioeconomic status go down to the lower classes. If heterosexual white males become ‘drag queen’ are an example of a "deviance vacations”, is a woman a lower stratum? Except heterosexual white males, are people like queer, colored races a lower stratum? I wonder what others think.

Comments


  1. The things you say are not lower class. It is more accurate to say that it is a minority than a lower class. Each person has a personality to be respected. When I think of it, the example used in the text is not going down to the lower tier but it seems to spend time in a different way than usual. And I do not think racial is used as an example deviance vacations.

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