Normality: A Critical Genealogy

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term enteredeveryday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientificterm used primarily in medicineto refer toa general state of health and theorderly functionof organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becomingless preciseandcoming to mean abalancedcondition to bemaintainedand 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.