Defining Deviance

Deviance is defined by negative reactions enacted by audiences to behaviour, expressed beliefs, and/or the possession of undesirable characteristics. Audiences vary in their reactions; what’s wrongful in one audience may be acceptable in another—hence, deviance is relative to audience, society, subgroup, context, and historical time. Typically, reactions express negative attitudes toward the violations of a strongly-held norm. Such reactions are varied, and include condemnation, withdrawing from the presence of the offender, and the unwillingness to join in interaction with the offending party or parties. Most members of the society can perform a mental experiment to picture what these reactions are likely to be for a range of audiences. The researcher conducted a survey among 60 park-goers to determine what is considered wrongful in the park. In the park, multiple parties put on performances of extremely eccentric or deviant behaviour. Felonious crime is very rare in the park; milder forms of deviance are common, however, including offensive staring and selling marijuana. Public gay sex, which used to be common, has all but disappeared there.

Sex and Gender in Public

Gender is linked to deviance, both with regard to women as victims, that is, the recipient of the unwanted actions of others, and as perpetrators, as the actors of behaviour others consider wrongful. Even the very occupation of a given space by women may be regarded as unacceptable by certain male audiences; sometimes, males may blame unwanted attention on the woman for appearing in public, or in a particular public place, on her unwanted presence in such spaces. Men are more likely to be crime victims than women but women fear being victimized in public more, developing a “geography of fear.” Men are more likely to be in singletons than women, and as the size of the unit increases, women increasingly predominate. Even among men, with respect to numbers, men are more likely to be in a social group than alone; this tendency is greater for women. The patterns of gender socializing may influence the park’s relative safety. Still, women are significantly more likely to socialize in the fountain area, which is safe, than in the perimeter walkway; men are much more likely to be in the perimeter walkway than women.

Race

Race plays a role in Washington Square Park, but often in unpredictable ways. The little survey the author conducted indicates that virtually no one in the park considers race a meaningful basis for social interaction with others, or has anything to do with judgments of deviance. Some urban public spaces are cosmopolitan in that all races are accepted on a more or less equal basis. The history of African Americans in and around the square has been conflictual, largely unwelcoming, and sometimes violent. The demographics of New York City and Greenwich Village indicates that very few African Americans live in the Village, far less than visitors to the park, and the black population of Manhattan is much smaller than that of New York City as a whole—and declining over time. The author conducted a racial tally of dyads in the park and found that whites in-socialize with other whites more than with any other group; blacks socialize more with other blacks than members of other racial categories, as do South Asians, but East Asians socialize more with non-East Asians. Overall, park-goers out-socialize more than elsewhere. The author believes that out-socialization may have long-term effects on racial acceptance.

Public Space

The aggregation and dispersal of people in a public space potentiate and may facilitate certain types of behaviour, deviant as well as conventional. Moreover, multiple factors potentiate aggregation and dispersal, including day of the week, weather, temperature, seasonality, hour of the day or night. Here, units of aggregation center on the number of parties in a unit: singletons (a single person, alone), dyads (two people, together), triads (three people), and triads-plus (more than three people together). Compared to other public locales, Washington Square Park has relatively few singletons, relatively many dyads, especially male-female dyads. Between the second half of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century, Washington Square Park moved from being a parochial to a public space—from a place where locals defended their own turf and excluded outsiders (especially African Americans) to a space where strangers of all kinds were welcome. The catchment area of the park is huge—most people who visit live in a different neighbourhood. The park’s neighbourhood is largely white and upper-middle-class; its visitors are vastly more diverse. All of these factors make for a place that accepts diversity and unconventionality.

The People in the Square

This chapter offers an introduction to Washington Square Park as a social space, a place that is meaningful and comprehensible, amenable to sociological analysis. Visitors (“actors”) engage in behaviour that others, onlookers or bystanders (“audiences”) consider wrongful; what do they do in response? The author’s intention in this book is to address and answer two questions: What constitutes deviance in a fairly unconventional milieu? And: How does a very diverse collective of such unconventional parties get along in a fairly confined space? Unconventional, non-normative, or “deviant” events taking place in the park are observed and described by the author, such as a dog-owner letting a dog off-leash, beer-drinkers speaking loudly and in a vulgar fashion while listening to loud, amplified rap music, skateboarders whizzing by, almost colliding with pedestrians, marijuana sellers soliciting customers, the mentally disordered screaming and ranting, a percussionist banging extremely loudly on a metal plate. Some park-goers chastise the offenders, some walk away from them, others ignore them. What are the dynamics of these interactions? The author details these events and points out their implications for the sociology of deviance and social control.

The Heterotopia

We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch ofjuxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-­side, of the dispersed. —Michel Foucault, 1986 Medicine defines the heterotopia as “a spatial displacement of normal tissue” (Lax, 1998, p. 115); it is a site in which biological material is ...

Social Control

Social control includes all the negative actions taken or the words spoken in reaction to behaviour audiences consider wrongful, which attempt to terminate or reduce the enactment of deviant behaviour. Such reactions include the actions of agents of formal social control—duly constituted representatives of organizations, including the state, empowered to exercise it—and informal social control, which is made up of ordinary persons, informal parties interacting with one another. Some actions may violate formally promulgated rules of an institution—smoking or drinking alcohol in Washington Square Park, for instance—that may be acceptable elsewhere. Other actions are not infractions of formal institutional rules, but may be regarded as offensive by informal audiences. Hence, they will attract different types of social control, that is, formal versus informal. Settings will vary with respect to how “loose” (lax) or “tight” (rigid) they are, that is, how much leeway exists as regards certain kinds of behaviour parties in them expect from actors. A school of researchers who study social control, including Michel Foucault and Stanley Cohen (“controlologists”), have imparted an orientation to the phenomenon which the author believes is unproductive for understanding behaviour in the park. Deviance and social control are joined at the hip: one is necessary for the other, and vice versa.