The Stigmatized Vernacular
Political Asylum and the Politics of Visibility/Recognition
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7097399 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shuman (corresponding author), Shuman Shuman (corresponding author), Bohmer, Bohmer Bohmer |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 199-199 |
| Publication date | 2012-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Folklore Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0737-7037 • E-ISSN: 1543-0413 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/jfolkrese.49.2.199 |
| OpenAlex | W3149803513 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 12 |
Building on Erving Goffman's discussion of stigma, this essay explores how stigma and normalcy produce each other. Stigmatizing includes processes of recognition, misrecognition, estrangement, and othering. We consider how the stigmatized vernacular produces and deploys visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility of cultural practices. Examining the experiences of political asylum seekers, we suggest that routinized violence produces a new kind of ordinary for victims of persecution; when these stigmatized individuals seek refuge in a new country, officials sometimes further stigmatize them by insisting on their own categories of 'normal.' We argue that any assessment of cultural context that depends on cultural norms is insufficient for understanding stigmatizing situations: conceptualizing 'the normal' is itself a means for enacting exclusions, and the stigmatized vernacular can be a pervasive mechanism for concealing discrimination under the guise of what is 'normal.' We propose that studying the stigmatized vernacular can serve as a critique of the veneration of the folk in folkloristic research
Aesthetics · Context (archaeology · Criminology · Invisibility · Linguistics · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Stigma (botany · Veneration · Vernacular · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology
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Getting Out
Queer legibility and the refugee status determination process
Inspirational Insights
Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility
Narratives of displacement and poverty
I Try Not to Be Dominant, but I’m a Lawyer!’
The politics of sanitization
Violent Exceptions
Queer asylum seekers
World Heritage and Cultural Economics
Producing Epistemologies of Ignorance in the Political Asylum Application Process 1
Investigating Narrative Inequality
Contradictory Discourses of Protection and Control in Transnational Asylum Law
Food, Form, and Visibility
The Influence of Diversity on Folklore Studies in the Decades of the 1980s and '90s
African American Diversity and the Study of Folklore
Representing Trauma
| Unique citing works | 10 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,77 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2025 (13) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |