Sex Work, Censure and Transgression

In The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary (1994:vii) Colin Sumner set out to “portray a history of one of the most developed forms of critical, formal, thought on the subject of moral censure, namely the sociology of deviance” critiquing the sociology of deviance and by introducing a new theoretical field called the sociology of censure. The text builds upon Sumner’s argument that the maintenance of rules and norms are the outcome of censures and argues that: social censures are cultural formations tied to social control, censures are objects of study, not tools of enquiry for social research and that using censure is valuable in cultural and political analysis and in seeking to “distinguish social attributions from ontological realties”. Sumner further argues that “since the norm of censure signified the deviance, it made more sense to begin looking at deviance as inherent within the signifying elements of the censure” (p. 309).