@article{Dennis_2010, place={Washington DC: American Sociological Association.}, title={Social Deviance}, url={https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/social-deviance}, abstractNote={Sociologists use the term deviant to refer to any behavior, belief, interest, activity, physical characteristic, or group affiliation used as a reason to mark people as wrong: immoral, criminal, psychopathic, subhuman. Deviance in itself is not necessarily immoral, illegal, or harmful: people are labeled deviant for things that are trivial (bad table manners), harmless (wearing earrings), unjust (being Jewish), condemned by only a small minority (being a single parent), or practiced by almost everyone (drinking alcoholic beverages). Conversely, people often get away with things that are immoral (sabotaging another student’s lab experiment), illegal (premarital sex in some states), and harmful (eating high cholesterol foods) without being labeled deviant. It is a matter of what someone with authority (religious leaders, scientists, professors, our parents, the mass media) decides is deviant. This course will investigate how attitudes toward deviant acts and actors have changed over time, from pre-Revolutionary France to the Roaring Twenties to the 1960s to the present.}, journal={TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology}, author={Dennis, Dr. Jeffery}, year={2010}, month={Apr.} }