Stereotyping stands in need of serious re-appraisal. This book provides a critical assessment of the concept and its use in the social sciences, considering its theoretical basis and historical development and linking these closely to the concept of the Other. As the first sustained book-length treatment of stereotyping in either sociology or media and cultural studies, the text embraces such key topics as nationalism and national identity, gender, racism and imperialism, normality and social order, and the figure of the stranger in the modern city. It is genuinely interdisciplinary, moving between sociology, social psychology, cultural history, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, and offers an indispensable examination of the roots of prejudice and bigotry in modern societies.