Stretched to the Limit: Organizations for Short Statured People and the Management of Stigma.

Abstract

While there has been a significant amount of work in the sociological literature looking at how short stature has become medicalized, virtually no research has been conducted as a comparison of the organizations that deal with issues of short stature. This dissertation examines how three such organizations mobilize around issues of stigma, normalcy, and difference. The data were collected through ethnographic fieldwork and 32 in-depth interviews with organization leaders and rank-and-file members of the following organizations: Little People of America (LPA), the MAGIC Foundation, and the National Organization of Short Statured Adults (NOSSA). My dissertation addresses the following research questions: 1) How and why do parents and persons considered short (or different) mobilize? 2) How do these movements frame their stance toward short stature, and how does this framing reflect their ideas about difference, normalcy, and stigma? 3) How do these movements frame their stance toward technologies affecting short people? 4) What strategies and tactics do the organizations use in articulating and publicizing their stance on the Internet, in the mass media, and to the general public? 5) What causes some short statured organizations to succeed while others ultimately fail? Utilizing previous research on social movements, I find that each organization has its own unique way of viewing short stature and subsequently how short stature should be dealt with, both within the organization and also within the general public; therefore, there is a chapter devoted to each organization. Using identity politics, assimilation, and normalization, respectively, each organization not only reacts to short stature differently, but also to the technologies that exist to mitigate the effects that short stature has, on both the individual and society-at-large. Drawing on previous work, we see how different types of social movement actors (e.g. parents, adult activists, etc.) mobilize around issues of difference, normalcy, and stigma, and whether a collective identity is created. Finally, through the dissolution of one of the three organizations during the course of this research, I directly compare the three organizations, pointing to characteristics that helped two succeed, while the other failed.