Category: Uncategorized
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Review of “Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality” by Dr Devyani Prabhat
Review by Dr Devyani Prabhat, 26th November 2020 – reblogged from Sociological Review. Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality is a book that connects a variety of contexts, including penal power, black power, borders, and austerity, through the use of stigma power. It is a demonstration of what C Wright Mills calls the ‘sociological imagination’, the ability…
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Black Lives Matter and Legacies of Slave Ownership in Lancaster: the Bond’s and the Booker Brothers in Guyana
Tracing Threads of Connection This is a photograph of Malena and Temi, both pupils at a local school, participating in a Black Lives Matter Protest on the steps of the Town Hall in Dalton Square, Lancaster, in June 2020. The photograph was taken by their friend, my 17-year old daughter, Bella, and is published here…
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The double-consciousness of the stigmatised
A short slightly adapted extract from chapter 5 of Stigma Sociological Imagination In The Sociological Imagination (1959), the American sociologist Charles Wright Mills famously stated that ‘no social study that does not come back to the problem of biography, of history and their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey’.[i] Indeed, the promise…
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Austerity UK: The Enclosure of the Welfare Commons
This is an extract from Chapter 4 ‘The Stigma Machine of Austerity’. The theme of enclosures runs through Stigma. One of the arguments of this chapter is that austerity should be understood as a form of capitalist enclosure. Enclosures of land, resources, people, are often lubricated by stigma. It is easier to take bread from the mouths…
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Stigma: the Machinery of Inequality, a short animated film
Thanks to Tom Morris (and also bow & arrow who did the sound design) for this short animated film. Below is the text spoken in the film which is taken from the Introduction of the book. The word stigma, as the dictionary defines it, is a mark of disgrace which is pressed upon a person. It describes…
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Misogyny and stigma
In this short extract from Chapter One ‘the Penal History of Stigma’ from Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality I tease out some historical threads to illustrate the entanglement of stigma and patriarchal systems of discipline and punishment. —————- In Women and Power: A Manifesto (2017), Mary Beard teaches us that women of all social classes…
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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.
