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In ‘The Spectacle of the ’Other”’ (2003), cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014) describes the process of social or cultural stereotyping.1 That something is stereotyped means that it works through a set of representational practices. As the outcome of these practices, the stereotyped object or person becomes reduced to a few essentials, as though it was fixed in nature or ontologically by a few, simplified characteristics. Hall explains that the process of stereotyping (or ‘othering’) corresponds to the way a cartoonist portrays, illustrates, and caricatures a certain type with a few, simple, essentializing strokes of the pen. The portrayed type becomes reduced to the signifiers of typical differences – for example, impiety, sexual immorality, fraudulence, unrestrainedness, or the like. The stereotyped description then becomes a popular type that reduces the individual portrayed to a few simplified, reductive, and essentialized features, easy to identify, copy, and pass on.

Hall claims that we always make sense of things in terms of wider categories – we understand the particular in terms of its type. We assign someone membership in a certain group according to class, gender, age, nationality, race, linguistic group, sexual preference, religion, political affiliation, and so on. A type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded. At the same time, change or development is minimized. However, the type is different from the stereotype. Stereotypes seize the few, simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characteristics of an object or a person, and then reduce everything about the object or person to those traits, exaggerate and simplify them without allowing them to change or develop. Edward Said’s (1935-2003) analysis of how Europe constructed a stereotypical image of ‘the Orient’ is an example of this.2 Said explains that far from simply reflecting what the countries of the Near East were actually like, ‘Orientalism’ was the discourse by which European culture was able to manage, and even produce, the Orient, politically, morally, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Thus, stereotyping reduces, essentializes, naturalizes, and fixes differences; there is no depth to a stereotyped presentation, merely surface.

Stereotyping deploys a strategy of splitting, dividing what is normal and acceptable – from a specific (cultural, ethnic, religious, moral, medical, etc.) point of view – from the abnormal and unacceptable. It also excludes or expels everything that does not fit the norm. Thus, stereotypes align closely with social types. But social types live by the rules of the cultural codes, whereas stereotypes are excluded. Stereotypes become ‘the other’ in the process of ‘othering’. What matters in the stereotyping process is that boundaries must be clearly delineated. Therefore, stereotypes are characteristically fixed, clear-cut, and unalterable. Thus, stereotyping works through closure and exclusion (or identity and othering), because it symbolically fixes boundaries and excludes everything that does not belong. Consequently, stereotyping is part of the maintenance of the social and symbolic orders: it establishes a symbolic frontier between the normal and the deviant, the healthy and the pathological, the acceptable and the unacceptable, what belongs and what does not or is ‘other’, between insiders and outsiders, us and them. In this way, stereotyping facilitates the symbolic bonding among those of us who are ‘right’ into one imagined community, thereby excluding all those, the others and outsiders, who are different and ‘wrong’. Roughly stated, this is what Stuart Hall presents as the essentials of stereotyping.