Overview
This week’s readings connect discrete moral panics to larger social structures and social and political changes and/or renewals as well as to demands for authoritarian measures.
The first reading consists of extracts from Gerassi’s book that tells the story of Boise Boys. The text explains how the moral panic around gay deviancy developed in an interplay between the media, the police and the courts.
I assigned the second reading, “The Strange Media Career of the Homosexual” to place the Boise Boys panic in a historical context: a history of how homosexuality has been conceived and thus treated through times. Fejes explains that homosexuality became a pathology in the period between 1940s and the 1970s when the APA decided to no longer define homosexuality as psychological illness.
- How does this chapter illustrate the notion that social problems are indeed social constructs? What kind of general anxieties were the moral panics around gays connected to?
- Homosexuals were clearly folk devils of these panics. What did the presence of such “folk devils” mean in relation to our understanding of social values and normality? In other words, how did these the figure of the gay folk devil draw the boundaries of society?
The third reading by Lancaster, “Panic: A Guide to Uses of Fear,” treat gay panics as part of sex panics in which child abuse figures pominently. He argues that moral panics are a recurring form of mass mobilization that has shaped U.S. society in distinctive ways over time, which has made American middle class the universal class with its moral values as universal values. Lancaster writes, “Panic, then, has become ever more intricately woven into the basic structure of politics and governance; it is a technique for running political campaigns, staging (in some cases contriving) and addressing social issues, and solving problems in a variety of communicative or administrative domains.”
Let’s be creative in our thinking. In which ways can we see this middle class morality that is rejuvenated through moral panics played out in the previous presidential elections? How did it influence the candidates’ appeals?
When answering the questions, please number them and actually list the question with the answer below it. It is super important that the questions are answered through the lens of the readings.