Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 49

Tannenbaum is credited by some with the origins of labeling theory (LT) in his 1938 delinquency book, Crime and the Community, in which he argued that assigning criminal labels to people increases the chances that they will become their labels (see McGrath, 2014; Willis, 2018). LT is concerned with the process by which deviant labels are both applied and received. Specifically, LT speculates about how people are “marked” (or labeled) as deviant, delinquent, or criminal and what the effect of the label is on their future behavior. Thus, LT has two tenets: (1) Some people are more likely to be labeled criminal because of their race, sex, class, and/or other factors; and (2) once people are labeled delinquent or criminal, they may accept or resign themselves to this label and continue in crime because of the labeling. In addition to the irony that labeling people “juvenile delinquents” or “offenders” may make offending worse, there is also the problem of whether there is gender, race, class, and other types of discrimination involved in who is labeled. The fairly recent #BlackLivesMatter movement has certainly stressed which citizens the police are most likely to use excessive force with, including lethal force (see Boyd & Dumpson, 2019). But given that labeling can result in an “offender” identity and continued offending, the ramifications of labeling become even more dire. Stated alternatively, official intervention (e.g., by the police) is disproportionately practiced among disadvantaged youths, thus more negatively impacting their education, employment, and criminal behavior (Bernburg & Krohn, 2003).

Although many scholars advanced the concepts behind LT (see Erikson, 1962; Kitsuse, 1962; Lemert, 1951), the most famous advancement is by Howard Becker (1963) in his research on jazz musicians, in the book Outsiders. Becker’s work is admirable in many ways, particularly his efforts “to find out how it worked by seeing it from the vantage point of those who lived there, from the viewpoint of those labeled deviant” (Naffine, 1996, p. 40). He collected his data through participant observation, playing the piano professionally with his subjects. Consistent with the theorists discussed thus far, however, Becker devoted his analysis almost exclusively to male musicians. When Becker wrote about women, it was most frequently as the wives of the men, and in these instances, these women are portrayed as boring, laughable, and “square.” Thus, whereas Becker used innovative and in-depth methods to get to know and understand the male musicians, his approach to studying the women “remained highly orthodox” (Naffine, 1996, p. 41). The women are seen only through the lens of the male musicians and are depicted as “nags” who threaten the livelihood of the band by trying to convince their husbands to get “real” jobs. When women musicians are given any attention in Becker’s analysis, it is only as sex objects, not as legitimate musicians—an all-too-familiar approach to studying nonconforming and criminal women (Naffine, 1987). In the work of Becker and many others, conforming women are portrayed as boring and spineless, whereas criminal men are seen as creative and exciting.