Month: January 2020
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The Stigma Politics of Caste
This extract from ‘The Penal Tatoo’, chapter one of Stigma: the Machinery of Inequality, argues that the stigma politics of caste is particularly instructive for understanding how power is inscribed on the body, and the ways in which stigma power is entangled with histories of racial and colonial capitalism. ‘Even after two decades, the sound…
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The ancient penal history of stigma
One of the first recorded uses of the word ‘stigma’ appears in a fragment of sixth-century BC poetry written by Asius of Samos, who uses the word stigmatias to describe ‘a marked slave’; and slaves are henceforth regularly and scornfully referred to with words such as literati (lettered), stigmatici (tattooed), inscripti (inscribed), and graptoi (written…
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Stigma: Letters of Blood and Fire
the catastrophe of slavery was written on the skin – with stigmata that transformed human beings into property, into things, into commodities, and into guineas.
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Shame is already a revolution of a kind
Extracted from a letter from Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, March 1843. From a series of letters written by Marx, age 25, to his friend Arnold Ruge. Marx and Ruge would later include the full eight-letter exchange in the first and only edition of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, in February 1844.
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“Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality” (updated extract from Introduction)
Every news bulletin seemed to be calling me scrounger, fraud, cheat or scum. I began self-harming, carving the words ‘failure’, ‘freak’ and ‘waste of space’ into my arms, legs and stomach. Stephanie, 2019
Professor Imogen Tyler 