Marginal People in Deviant Places Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism

• Main Author: Irvine, Janice M. (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: University of Michigan Press 2022
• Subjects: Society & culture: general; Sociology; Gender studies, gender groups; Ethnic studies; Gay & Lesbian studies; Society and culture: general;Sociology;Gender studies, gender groups;Ethnic studies;Gay and Lesbian studies / LGBTQ studies
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures-ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California-helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.