Essay
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Consider how the academic literature narrates the topic of gender or ‘race’ in relation to the concepts of ‘deviance’ and social control. What role does power play within these discussions?
As a part of socialization, social control is often defined as a regular feature within societies across the globe and is instilled within individuals since birth, becoming a part of their habits, values, and morals. The term glorifies certain members of the society as those having more influence and power, compared to others. Through social control, it is one or more of these defined groups having control over societal norms and added benefits that exercise power with the help of added presence in law enforcement and other similar establishments (Giddens and Sutton, 2017). Through Social Control, these groups can exercise added a form of oppression on the other groups in societies with lower influence, by having a majority say in what may be defined as defiant, or even criminal in the society.
The literature provides information about how the segregation of individuals in these groups is done, and how the shift of social control takes place within them. While multiple factors for the division within society exist, the literature majorly focuses on the aspects of race, and gender. The literature provides information about institutional racism, and how in the United States the sentences for similar crimes conducted by those who were racially identified as Blacks, or ethnically identified as Hispanics were longer than those for Caucasian white individuals. This is seen to be built based on the aspect of deviance, which labels individuals in the referred groups as those away from those that a majority of the existing society accepts as ideal. Those possessing these deviant identities are often subject to harsher societal norms, and can often be criminalized, whether that be for their race or identified gender. The movement for LGBTQ rights, Voting Rights for Women, and other similar gender-based movements have been observed to exist as those that define opposition to pre-empted deviant structures established for these groups by the ones exercising social control (Atkinson, 2014).
With the literature highlighting insights about social construct, societal norms, and deviance, specifically in terms of race and gender, the aspect of involved power held by those with more influence in society is discussed as one of the primary reasons behind the longevity of certain involved practices and standards. These groups are generally identified as being in the minority, which is a collective term used for those being outside the majority of society, instantly prevailing them as being farther away from what a large section of the society may consider ‘normal’ (Ritzer and Ryan, 2011). This further, as per the literature and discussion within it, leads to a radical shift of power in terms of influence and control of activities carried out by these so-called ‘deviants’, and the consequences involved in the same, with varying levels of punishments for those belonging to the minorities, and the majorities often observed.
Exclusion, Criminalization, and Illegality, collectively created through multiple factors of judgments for these particular groups based on gender and race are often utilized to conjure this radicalism of differing powers of control and influence within the society, aiming to continuously undermine, and overrule the minority, which is stated in the literature being discussed. The influence, power, and control of these groups can very well define, as per the literature, what similar factors can be considered possessing different degrees of disruptive qualities within the society, and be taken in a rather darker, or more positive light in different places in the world. With minorities of different factors existing around the globe, the influence of social power possessed by more prevalent groups brings different levels of power and control that define how the more undermined groups carry out their lives.
References
Atkinson, R. (2014). Introduction: Shades of Deviance, Crime and Harm. In: R. Atkinson, ed. Shades of Deviance. Abingdon: Routledge, p.1-13.
Giddens, A. and Sutton, P. W. (2017). Sociology. 8th Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ritzer, G. and Ryan, J. M. (2011). The concise encyclopedia of sociology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
