This talk rethinks – and refigures -- the concept of stigma.  It is primarily grounded in imagistic and phenomenological perspectives (especially feminist critical phenomenology) and the Black radical tradition.  It calls upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork among African American families raising children with disabilities and chronic illnesses.  From a phenomenological perspective, a figure is that which comes into view in relation to a ground, a horizon.  Horizons, by contrast to figures, tend to be out of perceptual awareness, part of what phenomenologists call the “natural attitude”and anthropologists speak of as common sense and the everyday.  I consider stigma by traveling through a series of figures:  Shaming Dramas, Errant Interruptions, Defrosting Concepts, and Perplexing Particulars.  The idea behind this figural voyage is to take stigma, a concept that is all too familiar (part of our own disciplinary background horizon, our own common sense), and disorient or “defrost” it in order to think it anew.