# Quote — Erving Goffman, Stigma

> In this essay I want to review some work on stigma, especially some popular work, to see what it can yield for sociology. An exercise will be undertaken in marking off the material on stigma from neighbouring facts, in showing how this material can be economically described within a single conceptual scheme, and in clarifying the relation of stigma to the subject matter of deviance. This task will allow me to formulate and use a special set of concepts, those that bear on 'social information', the information the individual directly conveys about himself.

- Author: [Erving Goffman](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman.md)
- Book: [Stigma](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma.md)
- Page: 9
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erving_Goffman#Stigma,_1963) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma/in-this-essay

## More from this book

> For over a decade now in the literature of social psychology there has been good work on stigma - the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance. This work has been added to from time to time by useful clinical studies, and its framework applied to ever new categories of persons.

p. 9 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma/for-over-a-decade.md)

> It is to be expected that voluntary maintenance of various types of distance will be employed strategically by those who pass, the discreditable here using much the same devices as do the discredited, but for slightly different reasons. By declining or avoiding overtures of intimacy the individual can avoid the consequent obligation to divulge information. By keeping relationships distant he ensures that time will not have to be spent with the other, for, as already stated, the more time that is spent with another the more chance of unanticipated events that disclose secrets.

p. 122 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma/it-is-to-be-expected.md)

> When there is a discrepancy between an individual's actual social identity and his virtual one, it is possible for this fact to be known to us before we normals contact him, or to be quite evident when he presents himself before us. He is a discredited person, and it is mainly he I have been dealing with until now.
>
> [...] However, when his differentness is not immediately apparent, and is not known beforehand, [...] he is a discreditable, not a discredited person [...]. The issue is [...] that of managing information about his failing. To display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when, and where.
>
> [...] It is this second general issue, the management of undisclosed discrediting information about self, that I am focusing on in these notes - in brief, 'passing'.

p. 57 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma/when-there-is-a-discrepancy.md)