Social Deviance

Melissa Moore

Sociology 111

February 19, 2014

For my act of deviance I decided to cross dress and go shopping. I dressed in my step dad’s clothes with my hair up in a bun under a baseball hat. I went to TJ Max because I find that store to be a little more on the feminine side even though they do sell boys clothes. I searched for clothes in the girl’s section and even tried some on before buying them.

The social construction of norms and deviance would be the fact that when we are in public or surrounded by people we feel the need to act a certain way or do certain things because that is the way society says we should do them. When people perform an act of deviance we assume they are strange or even foreign. Social society makes these rules that every one is just so accustomed to that when we see them being broken or challenged we notice easily.

While doing my project I got a lot of strange looks. I didn’t wear makeup so that people would be very confused on my gender. When I walked into the store I didn’t get very many looks until I started searching through the racks of clothes. While searching I had to excuse myself from a lot of women making them look at me. When they would look at me I would stare back and you could see the confusion and uncomfortability in their eyes. I think the fact that they couldn’t tell what sex I was made them for uncomfortable than the fact that I was searching for girl’s clothes. When I got to the dressing room is when it became more awkward. The woman was very confused when she saw the clothes in my hands and she looked at me for a good five seconds. I believe that she was more uncomfortable than the other woman at the racks because not only was I just looking through the girl clothes I was trying them on. After leaving the dressing room I went to check out and again got strange looks from the cashier but she didn’t look as uncomfortable as the dressing room worker. This could’ve been because the cashier was younger than...