Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your first book, Stigma by Erving Goffman, had a big influence on your ideas about disability.
Yes, I went back to Cambridge to do a PhD about how to understand disability and met the sociologist Anthony Gibbons and he said: ‘What are you going to do?’ And I told him my plans. He looked at me and said: ‘Goffman’, and marched off down the street!
But, actually, I had already read this book. And what is so interesting about Goffman is that he does what sociologists should do, which is to watch and to talk to people.
He was very interested in how people are different and how they deal with that in society. He wasn’t just talking about people with disabilities; he was also talking about gay people or ex-convicts or drug addicts – anybody who is different.
For him there were two types of people: those who are discredited and those who are discreditable. The discredited ones are the people whose difference is obvious and they have to manage interaction. So they come into a room and, for example, because they have a missing arm or are black in a racist society, they have to manage the interaction with people and put people at their ease. And then you have the discreditable, who are people whose difference isn’t immediately obvious. They might be gay for example. They have to manage information to ensure that people don’t discredit them.
For me he is one of the few sociologists that you can read for pleasure.
How did you identify with him personally?
Well, I have restricted growth, so obviously I am very different and so I could identify with the experiences and strategies that he described. I was growing up in mid 1980s Britain and he is talking about early 1960s America, but there were some common social rules of conduct.
In the disability world the early waves really focused on physical impairment and things like wheelchair-users and inaccessible buildings, but what they hadn’t explored sufficiently, in my view, was the interpersonal dynamics, the prejudice or the stigma, as Goffman would call it. One of my first papers looks at cultural attitudes towards people with disabilities and this helped with that.
Tom Shakespeare is a senior research fellow at Newcastle University and a consultant at the World Health Organisation, specialising in disability, bioethics and the arts. He writes a regular column at www.bbc.co.uk/ouch and is a member of Arts Council England.
