From the author of "Self-Presentation in Everyday Life," stigma deconstructs a person's feelings about himself and his relationship to the so-called "normal" society. Stigma is a luminous journey in the case of people who are unable to comply with the standards that the natural community calls.

Unqualified from full social acceptance, individuals are stigmatized. People with physical deformity, former mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those who have been ostracized for other reasons must constantly seek to adapt to their fragile social identities.

Their self-image must be in a daily confrontation and be influenced by the way others reflect it. Drawing extensively on biographies and case studies, sociologist Irving Goffman analyzes a person's feelings about himself and his relationship to "norms." He explores a variety of strategies that stigmatize individuals to use to deal with the rejection of others and complex types of information about themselves.

In Stigma, the interaction of alternatives faced by a stigmatized person is examined every day brilliantly by one of the leading social analysts in America.