Normality: A Critical Genealogy

by Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens (Contributor)

The concept of normal  is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. 

In Normality , Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does—and doesn’t—mean to be normal.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Reference, Sociology

464 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2017

About the author

Peter Maxwell Cryle is professor emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is the author or co-author of several books, including Frigidity: An Intellectual History.

Reviews

[Tomás Narvaja · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very lengthy and in-depth genealogy of normality that addresses the author's concern that recent scholarship view normality as primarily regulatory (following Foucault), leading to the normal being seen as matter of enforced conformity to a fixed standard. The authors point out that Foucault identified that normalization involved not just the dynamic of homogenization and standardization, but also a dynamic of individuation and differentiation. It is this latter dynamic that they are bringing into focus here, and that they believe the majority of contemporary literature on normality misses.

The authors do this by tracing the genealogy of the concept of normality as a medical concept where normality is used to refer to individual stability in a dynamic environment largely in reference to health alongside the mathematical conceptualization of the normal as the average. In doing so they touch on the work of scholars such as Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Quetelet, Bertillion, Lombroso, Galton, Davenport, Davidson, and ultimately Kinsey. They trace the discussion of the normal through French anatomical and physiological discourse in the 1820, debates on the value of statistics in medicine in the early-mid 1880s, the rise of physical anthropology and eugenics in the late 1800s, as well as the rise of sexology, psychoanalytic, and sexual hygiene research in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is in Kinsey’s work these two genealogies converge, but where the dominance of normality was driven not by a consensus about its meaning, nor by its cultural coherence, but by the sustained debate and enduring irresolution surrounding it and underlying it. Ironically, Kinsey's critique of normality ends up being one of a most powerful works that cements the value of normality as a concept within popular discourse.

I appreciated this quote as capturing one of the main ideas of the book, "Drawing attention to the incoherence of the term 'normal' or adopting a position of opposition to it, as though it does in fact represent a fixed standard, do not necessarily undermine its continued function as a cultural ideal, nor are they necessarily the most effective form of political critique. Awareness of the distinction between the average and the healthy does not undermine the popular idea of the normal but is a constitutive part of its conceptualization."

[Nat W · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book extensively documents the history of the word and definition of normal. It shows how it evolved into the concept we are familiar with now- as well as the eugenic history behind the word. I used this book as a source for a paper I wrote on the intersection between normality and fatphobia.