City of Belmont - Ruth Faulkner Public Library

Normality, a critical genealogy, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 407-431) and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Normality

bibliography

Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens

a critical genealogy

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. This book offers an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. It explores the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analysing 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

The normal in nineteenth-century scientific thought -- The "normal state" in anatomical and physiological discourse of the 1820s and 1830s -- "Counting" in the French medical academy during the 1830s -- Rethinking medical statistics: distribution, deviation and type, 1840-1870 -- Measuring bodies and identifying racial types, c. 1860-1880 -- The dangerous person as a type: criminal anthropology, c. 1880-1900 -- Anthropometrics and the normal in Francis Galton's anthropological, statistical and eugenic research, c. 1870-1910 -- The dissemination of the normal in twentieth-century culture -- Sex and the normal person: sexology, psychoanalysis and sexual hygiene literature, 1870-1930 -- The object of normality: composite statues of the statistically average American man and woman, 1890-1945 -- Sex and statistics: the end of normality

adult