Why Stigma? With Michaela Benson

What’s missing from mainstream thinking on stigma? And why must we confront power, politics and history if we are to fight dehumanisation and shame?

Imogen Tyler, author of "Stigma, The Machinery of Inequality", tells friend and fellow sociologist Michaela Benson how her thinking on stigma evolved through the time of Brexit, the “migrant crisis” and Trump – and why stigma power is alive in the widening “war on woke”. They discuss the need to celebrate movements and thinkers – from Du Bois to Black Power – long neglected by ‘stigma studies’.  And they consider the deep entanglement of stigma with migration – from colonialism to Brexit, to the dehumanisation of asylum seekers.

Plus: how can we amplify marginalised voices without reproducing the stigma they face? And how did Imogen’s experience as a working-class student lead to her fascination with the subject – and to a tattoo?

Read more about Michaela Benson and The Stigma Conversations at The Sociological Review

Note: This episode was recorded in Winter 2022, after Manston processing centre was emptied. Read more about the death of Hussein Haseeb Ahmed at Manston here. You can also read the coroner’s report of Nov 2022 into the death of Awaab Ishaak in Rochdale, plus this statement from Awaab Ishaak’s family, and this from Rochdale Boroughwide Housing

Credits

Host: Imogen Tyler
Guest: Michaela Benson
Executive and Development Producer: Alice Bloch
Guest: Michaela Benson
Project Lead: Imogen Tyler
Project Officer: Danielle Galway
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music and Artwork: Bruce Bennett 

Episode resources:

• Shame lives on the Eyelids in Imogen’s book Stigma: the Machinery of Inequality - (2020)
• The Condition of the Working Class in England - Friedrich Engels (1845)
• Never Again: Refusing race and salvaging the human - The Holberg Lecture given by Paul Gilroy (2019)
• Du Bois: Addressing the Colour Line - Gurminder K Bhambra, The Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project.
• From Stigma Power to Black Power - Imogen’s graphic essay with Charlotte Bailey (2019)
• Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - Erving Goffman (1963)

From Michaela Benson:

• Who Do We Think We Are? – Podcast
• Read more about Michaela’s research on Brexit, Migration, Citizenship and Borders

Find extended reading lists and learn more at The Sociological Review 

Take Action!

Citizens Advice
Poverty Truth Network

Transcript

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Imogen Tyler: 0:00

Hi I'm Imogen Tyler. Welcome to The Stigma Conversations. I'm a sociologist working on social inequalities and here I'm meeting activists, academics and frontline workers to rethink stigma, how it works, where it comes from, why it matters in a society broken by poverty, prejudice, injustice.

Professor Alice Bloch: 0:35

What it leads us to is societies that are based on fear, on inequalities, on people without basic rights – it creates a society where you've got groups of people always looking over their shoulder who are vulnerable permanently.

Andy Knox: 0:52

A lot of people come to us simply to say, my life's terrible, and I don't know what to do about it. And a lot of the physical and mental health stresses that they are experiencing, are actually directly related to poverty.

Imogen Tyler: 1:09

I've been thinking about stigma for ages. And in 2020 I wrote a book mapping out a new way of understanding stigma as a form of power. Why new? Look at how stigma's usually talked about – take taboo busting campaigns around mental health these tend to focus on talking about feelings and experiences. And that's crucial because stigma is real, personal, and literally deadly serious. It digs into your skin, it makes you doubt your self worth. But – as well as asking how stigma makes us feel – I think we must also ask how it's produced, why and from where? Because I don't think it's just some byproduct of an unequal society. I think stigmas orchestrated actually – to enable reproduce and normalise those inequalities. And if we don't call out the systems – poverty, racism ableism colonial capitalism – that create and compound stigma and distress in the first place – then we just go round in circles while the elite few gain from the division stigma creates. Okay, that might all sound a bit right on, not least with the"war on woke". But that itself is a product of ramped up stigma politics, and seeing stigma as a top down thing really matters–what I call stigma power – dehumanises, the most vulnerable and it makes them expect and settled for less. It makes us devalue ourselves and others and it's everywhere. Seeing this makes us angry. But recognising stigma for what it is – about power rooted in history –helps us see how the machinery of stigma power really works. And making that visible helps us to have more hopeful conversations. It can even help us throw a spanner into the machine.

Andy Knox: 3:12

We are at, I would say an apocalyptic moment. That means things have been revealed for what they're truly like. Apocalypse simply means to reveal. And so now is the exact moment in which the fulcrum turns.

Helen Greatorex: 3:29

Because if you're outraged about something, the chances are, it's linked to some sort of policy that could be changed, that could then improve people's lives.

Geraldine Onek: 3:40

I think with antiracism, it's that proactivity isn't it like – actively having those discussions, even though they make you feel uncomfortable?

Imogen Tyler: 3:48

That's Andy, Helen and Geraldine, activists and frontline workers from where I live in northwest England, more from them soon. But I wanted to start the series by talking to my sociologist friend and colleague, Michaela Benson, who I spent lots of time with when I was starting to write about stigma around 2016. And I asked her if she remembered those conversations.

Michaela Benson: 4:23

Yeah, I definitely do. I mean, it was a time where you and I were taking time to walk and talk together about sociology, you seem to be really troubled by this very common place concept of stigma, which is really widespread in sociology. That's been written about by people like Goffman. And you seem to really be questioning what value it would add to revisit this at this point in time and to think differently about it.

Imogen Tyler: 4:51

Yeah, in particular, that focus on individuals and interaction that is sort of how stigma is written about in sociology and in psychology, and what's missing from that. So I was really kind of caught up in this idea of well, stigma, whatever it's around – disability or it's around class, it's around poverty or welfare – I really wanted to look up and start thinking about where stigmas coming from in the first place. And also look back and try and think about what the histories of kind of different forms of stigmatisation are. So as well as thinking about how stigma makes people feel, I wanted to think about stigma more as a kind of form of power.

Michaela Benson: 5:40

Yeah, I think it comes across really clearly – that idea of stigmatisation being the process and exploring that process. And then from there, thinking about power and politics, actually.

Imogen Tyler: 5:51

Yeah. And what I felt was missing, one of the things – is how certain ways of thinking and writing about stigma in the past had kind of been missed in contemporary sort of sociology and social thought. So one of the things I really wanted to do is foreground racism as a kind of particular form of stigmatisation. And also draw in things like black scholarship – Dubois's work, for example – which has often been left out of sociologies, as you know. But also kind of more activist types writing from the Civil Rights Movement, for example – that explicitly talk about racial stigma. So the Black Power movement is one of the things that I began to think about as a kind of anti stigma movement that sought to really rehumanise Black populations in the US against kind of the power of racism, or racial stigma.

Michaela Benson: 6:49

I think what's really interesting about it is that your kind of imagining of all of this, and your kind of bringing all of those things together, is unique in thinking across those different things that were happening at that point in time. And I think that, you know, it's not, it's not a surprise that you started to ask those questions when we were having those conversations, which I think was around 2015/2016.

Imogen Tyler: 7:15

Yeah, because in that moment, of course, there was what I would call the stigma politics of Trump – this credible online explosion of hate speech, etc, that was surrounding that. Also, we were leading up to Brexit. And you know, the politics of Brexit, which again led to huge stigmatisation of particular groups– in particular kind of migrants. So we're in this sort of period of a kind of intensification of what I began to think of as a kind of top down stigma politics – where groups if you like, who previously won rights – were being attacked, from queer to trans people to women, and kind of intensification of misogyny, etc. And I think really, that's intensified since. You know, we've got this so called "war on woke" and for me that, you know, I understand that precisely as an intensification of a sort of stigma politics, which is kind of extended to include, you know, a vast array of groups – from trans people, even environmental campaigners, and even those working on the frontline of the current kind of economic crisis – are also finding themselves drawn into this sort of intensification of sort of hate speech.

Michaela Benson: 8:38

I think that that's a really useful point around how the scale of this stigmatisation seems to have expanded that kind of sense of intensification. But I think that there's another side to this too – that you tease out in your work – which is to kind of consider what that stigmatisation is doing, not just for the people who are experiencing it, but also in respect to politics and power. And I wondered if you wanted to unpack that a little bit more?

Imogen Tyler: 9:08

Yeah, I mean, I suppose I began to think about what's the role of stigma in kind of, the government of people. So what role is stigma playing in, for example, the demonization of people claiming benefits, and how that isn't just to demonise those people – that's also a means to kind of legitamate particular social policies – such as austerity and the rollback of the welfare state. So I began to really try and connect what I saw as top down stigma production, not only on its impact on individuals– but actually what its kind of wider purpose or role may be – and the way in which you kind of create social divisions in the process. And it's sort of creates a sort of divide and rule sort of strategy – frames particular Groups is more deserving or more legitimate than others, devalues people. You know, I think welfare stigma is a really good example. But I also think a really current example and an ongoing example is the dehumanisation of migrant populations in the UK.

Michaela Benson: 10:18

I think that one of the things that really stands out to me is this idea of stigma becoming inscribed on the body – of bodies actually being marked by it.

Imogen Tyler: 10:28

Yeah, I mean, one, one of the things that I did when I began thinking about stigma was to go back to its etymology – and stigma came from a ancient Greek word for tattoo. So it really meant a penal tattoo. So it was literally a tattoo written on the body. So, for example, if you were a slave in ancient Greece, you know, and you stole something, you might have "I am a thief" tattooed on your forehead. So I began to think about stigma, as a practice of power that is written on the body. Tracing the meaning of the word became key to developing a new theoretical understanding of the term for me,

Michaela Benson: 11:07

That's really clear also in the way that you title that final chapter – which is always the one that stands out to me – which is the one that's based on your own experiences of being stigmatised. The title of the chapter is "Shame lives on the eyelids" – and I think that really captures that sense of how stigma marks bodies. So I think... the other thing that really stands out to me is how that concept of stigma power threads together a whole set of examples that normally we don't see in conversation with one another, but also the possibility of resistance, nonetheless, to some of that.

Imogen Tyler: 11:49

It's funny, you should mention the final chapter, because that chapter partly came out of our conversations – and I probably wouldn't have included that chapter in the book if you hadn't persuaded me to Michaela. But I guess this is really where I start to reflect on why I'm interested in the concept of stigma on a personal level, as well as a scholarly level. And I start to reflect on my own background in that chapter. You know – growing up in a working class family in a very remote rural village, meeting an anthropologist and discovering through this anthropologist that the village I'd grown up in had been the subject of a covert study. That was quite a shocking realisation that I was kind of the object of a kind of anthropological gaze and one which I found then very stigmatising – you know, the realisation of that. Which is also kind of a set of reflections on, you know, class and stigma and shame and being made to feel ashamed because you don't fit in a particular kind of middle class type environment. And at the end of publishing the book, I actually went and got a tattoo – which was kind of a personal way of marking... completing the book. And I got the Greek word for stigma tattooed – and I think it was your partner Michaela – who actually checked the spelling for me to check that I wasn't tattooing myself permanently with something else. So yeah, so that was kind of an interesting process for me personally – to, to reflect on those histories mysel – my own relationship to being stigmatised and experiencing stigma – but also kind of wanting to mark that. In.. so when you talk about resistance, I'm really interested in the ways in which stigmatising marks or marking out the other.. cannot... is also a site of struggle and resistance. And it's also the ways in which and throughout, you know, my work are trying to think about – okay, you're being stigmatised but you... there's something of you that always evades that – there's something of the human that can always evade and resist that process of stigmatisation. So getting a tattoo myself was a way of thinking about my own resistance to practices of and experiences of stigmatisation. And that's a kind of theme in the work. Stigma is never complete – if you like and never fully captures somebody. And there's always resistance and struggle in relationship to stigma power.

Michaela Benson: 14:25

I think that's a really important point. I just wondered if you wanted to reflect on similar processes – particularly in respect to the points about migrants that you've been making so far?

Imogen Tyler: 14:41

You know, over the last year, I think, and much longer you know, we saw this in Brexit – and I can ask you about that. You know, it's it's really shocking the way in which people on the move can be so incredibly dehumanised – both by the state and terms of politics, policiy, state apparatus – and in kind of media campaigns and the impacts of that. And you know, I was thinking about the recent example of the death of an asylum seeker at Manston and how the dehumanisation of migrants – and particularly of asylum seeking populations – has become so incredibly normalised. And that how that's become normalised is through these longer histories and practices of stigmatisation and othering of that group. I mean, to turn the question back to you, I mean, I know, Brexit and the Brexit campaign and the aftermath of Brexit is something that you have thought a lot about. I'd be interested to hear your reflections on, you know, perhaps on Brexit and the campaign itself – as engaging in stigma politics at a kind of national scale.

Michaela Benson: 15:56

While you were speaking, one of the things I was actually thinking about – and this is true of the Brexit campaign, as much as everything else is – is the reduction of migrants to numbers – which I think is also a process of dehumanisation– and not seeing them A. as individuals or even as people, as agents of their own life. And instead of thinking about, you know, all possible costs, we have to deter these people from arriving in the UK in any way, shape, or form. And Brexit being the political tool that was mobilised, apparently, to those, to those ends. And I think subsequent to that – I mean, you've already mentioned Manston, the processing service centre for asylum – that I think recently closed down actually, after quite a lot of public outcry – which I see as you know, again, resistance to some of that divide and rule stuff that you were talking about before. But also that continued kind of stigmatisation of people arriving in the UK through irregular means – as people who are not deserving of being here and not deserving of humanitarian treatment, actually. In a context where the government has opened up explicit humanitarian routes for other populations. So that... all of that process of sorting and categorising stigmatisation– the attaching to those people arriving through irregular routes as people who are doing something wrong and therefore should be punished for it. And the punishment being either you're left to drown at sea, or you're deported to a country that doesn't have a good track record in human rights – and given no right to return to the UK through that – I think shows how these things are playing out in the present day.

Imogen Tyler: 17:41

Yeah, and I think one of the things I really want to do in relationship to the these sort of contemporary issues, is think about the histories of stigma as ways of classifying and sorting people into human, not quite human – it's that sort of classificatory politics, it's entangled with stigma. And in the next episode, after this one Michaela, I'm going to talk to another sociologist – Alice Bloch, you know – on those histories, and on her work on Holocaust survivors, and the generations afterwards. You know, going back to this idea of stigma as bodily marking, but yeah, I think you need that kind of historical way of thinking about it, in order to think about how these patterns of stigma, actually, you know, have these historical precedents and they kind of intensify at particular moments in different ways – but understanding them for me in historical access gives us real insight into the contemporary moment actually. And it can be quite shocking to realise for example – the repetition of how asylum seekers are stigmatised today and the echoes of that with for example – genocides in Europe in the 20th century – and echoes back from that to colonial sort of practices of stigmatisation, dehumanisation etc.

Michaela Benson: 19:15

I think that's really important. And I would just add to that, that in addition to that, what you see – particularly when it comes to those conversations around the stigmatisation of migrants – then how those forms of stigmatisation were given legitimacy through particular modes of governing and controlling the movement and settlement of people. So you find these processes – many of which have their roots in colonialism, but also get further entrenched through eugenics and race science – finding their way into this almost acceptable form of governing people, which kind of embeds that stigmatisation within, within the way of controlling those populations.

Imogen Tyler: 19:58

Yeah, and another example that springs to mind as you're talking is the reports that came out recently, back in November about the death in 2020 of 2 year old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale and how the Housing Association tried to kind of stigmatise and shift blame onto the family for the damp and mould in the flat that they are supposed to be upkeeping. In a way, stigmas tied up with this, these sorts of political economies – of poverty, of migration – you know, and Engels uses the term social murder to state sanctioned violence. And I think the dehumanisation of people from particular communities – asylum seekers, migrants, but also people living with poverty – are enabled through this kind of stigma politics, it's sort of legitimates it.

Michaela Benson: 20:52

I think that's a really good bridge to talking about the work that you've been doing around poverty.

Imogen Tyler: 20:57

Yeah. So I think one of the things that stigma does is actually silences people. You know, it hides people it conceals the person through the kind of labelling and the naming, etc. And the kind of blizzard of sort of stigma publicity around certain populations and groups. And what we don't hear from is actually the people who are experiencing, you know – whether it's poverty, whether it's being an asylum seeker – we don't get to see them or hear from them enough. And one of the things I've been doing probably for about a decade now, is working with anti-poverty groups and activists. One thing I got very involved in that was really influential to me – in thinking about anti stigma practices– was working with the Poverty Truth movement. And I was a member of a local Poverty Truth Commission. And we'll be hearing from – later in episodes of some of the people I work with on that commission – and Poverty Truth is a kind of grassroots social movement, and it's grounded in the principles that people would lift experience need to have a voice and agency in social and political decision making. And that people living in poverty aren't the problem. Poverty is the problem – but it's actually everybody's problem. And, you know, to transform the conditions of economic injustice, you have to have kind of attitudinal change, as well. And I kind of really began to think about Poverty Truth as a kind of anti stigma, movement, you know – a kind of response to that stigmatisation of people claiming benefits as welfare cheats, etc – that we really saw escalate with austerity. You know, the other side to that or how to fight back against that, how to resist that, is actually through deep listening and engagement with people with lived experience – and kind of amplifying the voice of lived experience in that debate. And we'll be hearing later on in the series from Helen Greatorex – who heads Citizens Advice in North Lancashire, who I met through Poverty Truth – and also from my friend, Andy Knox – who's a GP – who I also met through Poverty Truth Commission. And actually, one of the things I really learned from working with them – who are in a sense, professionals at the frontline of the poverty crisis – is how the stigma of living in poverty not only impacts those who are experiencing that stigma kind of firsthand – but also how it, you know – increasingly perhaps at the moment as we're in a poverty crisis now, in terms of cost of living – is it starts, extends to the stigmatisation of professionals and frontline workers. So the sort of trauma of stigma not only impacts those who are experiencing it, but it actually also impacts those who are allied to or working with those who are experiencing it.

Michaela Benson: 23:58

I think that's something that's allied to this– and it goes back to your points around "a war on work" as well –is my experience of having done work on Brexit. In a context where this whole political moment had been narrated around the idea of the public having had enough of experts, for example. And for me, going through that experience made me wonder about– if as an academic with a high level of expertise, a lot of education, somebody who knows a lot about what they're talking about, has spent years studying this, and occupies a position that ordinarily we might consider as relatively powerful– if I'm struggling to get people to listen to me, what about those activists? You know, if it's creating challenges for activist scholars – what does this mean for the people who've been dehumanised in the way they've described? To your mind, what do we need to be aware of in thinking about our relationships with those who are the most dehumanised, in our role as activist scholars? I think there are some tips about that in your book, but also in your current scholarly practice?

Imogen Tyler: 25:10

It's how to act ethically, isn't it – in a way where we engage ethically, reflecting on our own positions with people with less power – but also amplify their experiences at the same time. It's sort of, it's worse, you know – being a sociologist, it crosses over different spheres, you know – where you've got to really think about how do you work with communities of people who are marginalised and stigmatised in ways that is both ethical and not extractive – but also amplifies their voices, and really allows us to hear what's otherwise concealed and hidden. It makes me think of Geraldine Onek and Jasmine Patel – who we're going to meet later on in the series – who I met through a different type of work – not anti poverty work, but through anti-racist activism – through Lancaster Black History group. And that group emerged as a community group in 2020, after the Black Lives Matter movement. And one of the really nice things about that episode – and when you'll get to hear from them – is actually how that is a kind of different type of anti-stigma work, you know, but it's, it's a very important one. But it kind of is also very hopeful. So it's, I think it's quite difficult when you're thinking about poverty right now, in the UK – given the scale of the crisis with we face – sometimes it feels, fills you with despair. But, but that project, and that work has kind of made me feel incredibly hopeful about the power of education as a kind of force to change society – to change the way people think and perceive and talk about histories and their impact in the present in ways that's actually very reparative. I suppose all of my research, I guess, and thought about it till now is a kind of anti-stigma practice. So it's not just that I'm thinking about stigma. It's also that I'm trying to do anti-stigma, work, through my research and through my community activist work. I was talking to my friend and colleague at Lancaster University, the sociologist Michaela Benson, and you can read more about Michaela in our episode notes. Hopefully, you've got a sense of what I'm getting at with stigma – the need to look up and back, to look at feelings and experiences – but also how and why stigma is produced, how stigma machines are set in motion – to mark some bodies over others, to immobilise, humiliate, dehumanise. And I talk about stigma machines, because I want to trouble the view of stigma as some individual level thing – and push for a more structural understanding of stigma – as a form of power that divides and classifies us. So stigma machines move and morph depending on the systems they're designed in, and the desires of those who make them. Today we see stigma production whirring away all over the place – from the stigma politics exercised by states, politicians, spin doctors, think tanks – to stigma craft in the media – from PR to reality TV, news journalism. And then there's the stigma production ticking along in everyday racism, ableism and misogyny, both online and offline. Basically, it's all alive and well, which means talking properly about stigma matters more now than ever. When my book came out in 2020, things were already pretty bad here in the UK. But now after austerity, Brexit and COVID-19. And amid deep recession – poverty and destitution threaten the lives of millions, the promises of the mid 20th century welfare state – cradle to grave safety net, greater equality of health, wealth, opportunity. These seem to have been abandoned and we're seeing a stigma boom as the war on woke dehumanises an ever bigger circle of people – trans people, anti-racist activists, environmental campaigners – and even as we'll see later – those who care for others. We'll also see stigma power at work and the resurgence of fascism as my chat with Michaela reminded us. Across Europe in state led campaigns against refugees and migrants. In fact, I'll be returning to talk about both racism and the criminalization of migrants later in this series. But I'd like to end on a note of hope. Stigma machines can feel overwhelming – especially once we start to draw connections between things such as migration and histories of racism, poverty, welfare and shame. But thinking about this connected history as a stigma power is part of a crucial process of reparative justice that helps to build solidarity movements, critical practices – the cultural theorist Paul Gilroy talks about – as the ongoing collective work of salvage. It's hard work – but essential if we're going to risk being divided, and instead work to rise in outrage together against the stigma machines. Next, I'm talking to sociologist Alice Bloch about stigma and bodily marking, but also subversion, solidarity and resistance. And speaking of solidarity – please do share the stigma conversations far and wide. Click follow in the app you're using to hear this to ensure you catch every episode. You can also find reading lists for the series over at the podcast page of thesociologicalreview.org. My producer was Alice Bloch. Our sound engineer was Dave Crackles. Thanks for listening.