Includes bibliographical references and index.

Medicalizing the deviance of drug abuse -- Removing the stigma from mental illness -- Expanding the market for mental illness -- Moral panics and the social construction of deviance -- Postmodern pedophilia -- Stigma and sexual orientation -- Celebrating the sexually adventurous adolescent -- Rape, real and imagined -- A death of one's own -- The language of deviance.

"In The Politics of Deviance, Anne Hendershott, a leading sociologist herself, analyzes social attitudes in areas once considered clear venues of deviance, including substance abuse, teenage promiscuity, suicide and pedophilia. In the past, she notes, a moral consensus governed our attitudes toward these and other questionable behaviors; but today, pressure groups have profoundly changed our society's norms of right and wrong."