Sociologist Erving Goffman's (1963) seminal work theorized stigma as “an attribute that is deeply discrediting” (p 13). In the symbolic interactionist tradition, he emphasized that it was the meaning ascribed to particular attributes through relationships and social interaction that led to stigma. In the decades following Goffman’s (1963) influential work, social psychologists focused extensively on understanding attitudes about various stigmatized attributes (Link & Phelan, 2001). Around the new millennium, however, there was a notable “turn” in the stigma literature with Link and Phelan’s (2001) call for a sociological re-examination of the stigma concept (Cameron & O’Reilly, 2015). Link and Phelan (2001) argued that psychosocial research on stigma, while immensely valuable in understanding biased attitudes, took for granted that the attributes that were stigmatized were problematic. In other words, psychosocial approaches had individualized the notion of stigma and there was little consideration of macro level, systemic factors, that constructed some attributes, but not others, as deviant. They argued that what was needed was attention to the way in which social construction, labeling and power relations related to stigma. This emphasized the roles of authority and power in relation to powerlessness and oppression, aspects of stigma that have been little researched.
