Any behavior that violates socially or legally accepted standards can be viewed as deviance. It has been long believed that this term is equivalent to social pathology or disorganization that most people consider immoral (Clinard & Meier, 2015). Examples of deviance include substance abuse, crime, and prostitution (Clinard & Meier, 2015). However, the definition of this concept remains elusive because people’s understanding of specific cases varies (Clinard & Meier, 2015). For instance, homosexuality was perceived as deviance less than a century ago in Western countries, but it is accepted as a norm nowadays. Figure 1 represents the punk music fans who were viewed in the past as those who exaggerated colors, clothing, and hairstyles; hence, the majority considered this subculture deviant.
Since norms are relative, it is hard to clearly state what activity is deviant. For example, not all people think that walking on the streets with a mohawk every day is abnormal. The young men represented in Figure 1 who liked punk-rock seemed comfortable being different from other people. However, this music and the dressing style associated with it were perceived as “the proof of the degeneracy of capitalist culture and evidence of the disaffected youth of the West” (Patton, 2018, p. 1). On the other hand, individuals who supported this movement viewed it as a global revolution to erase the boundaries created by the Cold War (Patton, 2018). Indeed, the destruction of these barriers between the countries with opposing ideologies became possible because punk music pushed people to realign their values around cultural rather than political identities (Patton, 2018). Still, the appearance, language, and behavior of this genre’s musicians and their followers were shocking for older generations in both the capitalist and communist worlds.
References
Clinard, M. B., & Meier, R. F. (2015). Sociology of deviant behavior (15th ed.). Cengage Learning US.
Patton, R. A. (2018). Punk crisis: The global punk rock revolution. Oxford University Press.
Riot Radio. (2013). The home of punk, metal, and rock music[Image attached]. [Cover photo update]. Facebook.