The Consequences of Income Inequality

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Recommended: Concepts related to deviance

The social construction of deviance is exemplified by the fact that homophobia has replaced homosexuality as deviant. By “social construction of deviance,” we understand deviance to be the outcome of different groups in society defining and labeling what is deviant. For example, until recently, religion, medicine, and government defined homosexuality as a sin, a sickness, and a crime. In the 1970s, psychologists removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders after new research showed that gays and lesbians were just as healthy and unhealthy as straight people. Over several decades, governments decriminalized homosexuality based on new medical definitions and legal cases as a result of the gay rights movement getting people to understand that gay people should be considered and treated like normal people. While some religions still label homosexuality a sin, others have changed their view of homosexuality and some even bless same sex unions. At the same time that the status of homosexuality was changing, psychologists started to define anti-gay views as homophobic. The peopl...

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    This has not always been the case, but society has attempted to find ways to justify this classification. Society’s attempt to cast homosexuality as deviant started with comparing homosexual bodies to heterosexual bodies, using heterosexuals as the standard for normal. Some scientists believed that homosexual people had an unhealthy “pathological condition” that caused “disorders of the brain”, which then leads to homosexuality (Terry 131). Scientists also believed that homosexuality was a condition where humans lose their “adaptive ability”, causing them to engage in homosexual behavior instead of pursuing a heterosexual relationship which will further the species ( Terry 132). By attributing more disabilities to the idea of the homosexual, society was socially constructing their deviance. Despite the fact that none of these theories could be proven, the mere idea that homosexual people were missing something pathological boxed their bodies into a deviant category. In addition, scientists also believed that genitalia could give some insight to why a person was homosexual. These scientists create diagrams and drawings of homosexual genitalia and tried to portray them as deviant and abnormal. For instance, Robert Dickinson, a scientist studying genitals and their relation to homosexuality, believed that larger genitalia suggested homosexual tendencies (Terry 141-143). Comparing his drawing of

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