Sociology of Deviance: A Critical Discussion of Gardens of the Night - Essay Example

Leslie was led to think that her parents were all dead. On the one hand, Donnie was told that his parents traded him for drugs. From this monstrous past, they strived together on the streets in order for them to rebuild their lives far from the two immoral creatures who had corrupted their beings. Nonetheless, they had not escaped the world of prostitution. In order to survive, Leslie had to sell her body to different men. Likewise, Donnie was prostituting his own body as well. Stealing was ordinary.

Alcohol and drugs were similarly typical. Cigarettes had been their companionship. They kept on moving from once place to another and had not any stable place to stay. This had been her routine. Their lives were indeed not the typical lives every individual should have. Indeed, this fim of some grotesque acts of inhuman violationis indeed heart – breaking. It is full of inequality and cruelty in life. This is basically because prostitution is something not accepted in our society. In this regard, the focus of this paper mainly delves at critically discussing through a sociological perspective how being a hoe as a deviant act is depicted and constructed in the movie, “Gardens of the Night”. . In a sociological context, deviance is generally explained as actions or behaviors that violate the normative standards of a society (Deutschmann, 2006; Macionis & Gerber, 2010).

In her book entitled “Deviance and Social Control”, Deutschmann (2006) specifically described that the failure to conform to the normative standards encompasses any improper, immoral, weird, unusual and contaminating characteristics as well as behaviors such as sin, treason and terrorism, violence, rudeness, road rage, insanity, nudism, obesity, alcoholism, drug trafficking, adultery, sexualities, prostitution and a whole lot more of other acts or features that are found to be beyond the acceptable limits of the society.

On the one hand, apart from being a violation of the normative standards, deviance can also serve as a function of responsive and spontaneous construction of the individual selves to conform. It is the case that more often than not, deviance is perceived as negative. In this regard, Goffman (1963) reasoned that those people who are regarded as deviant are being labeled and stigmatized, hence, they are turning out to be marked. According to Heatherton, Kleck, Hebl & Hull (2000), the stigmatized experiences ostracism, humiliation, rejection, and devaluation.

True enough, they are discriminated, insulted and abused. For people to escape such negative respones of the society towards them, thus, they are expected to conform. In the social world, deviance is indeed one aspect of society. For Durkheim, this serves a purpose of being a normal and essential part of any social organization because it asserts the norms and cultural values which govern the social group (Macionis & Gerber, 2012). Through knowing what is expected from the individuals, they