“Who Is Watching me?”: Recovering the Grammar of Stigma in Interaction

This article offers a praxeological respecification of stigma. I argue that the term “stigma” is a category term and glossing device, used to gather together and stand in for a diverse range of interactional experiences, including, but not limited to, degradation, discrediting, discrimination, marginalization, and being demeaned. To understand stigma, we must turn from theorizing the concept to examining the lived and situated practices it glosses. The argument for this praxeological respecification unfolds in three stages. First, I argue that “stigma” does not name a discrete attribute or entity, but is a term used to denote and gloss a heterogeneous set of social experiences. Second, I show that these experiences are produced and made accountable in and through interaction. Third, I argue that our analyses must recover the Gestalt contexture—the praxeologically produced contextual whole—through which participants in an interaction see what is happening as stigmatizing or otherwise. This is an immanent, not theoretical, undertaking. Attempts to frame these experiences through the application of external explanatory frameworks often obscure the very dynamics under investigation. I conclude with a brief analysis of an extract from a publicly available interactional case: a live‐streamed panel discussion on HIV stigma, available on YouTube. In this setting, stigma appears not as an abstract structure or inner experience, but as a public, contested, and reflexively managed feature of social life.