Normality : A Critical Genealogy - Peter Cryle

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Normality

A Critical Genealogy

By: Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens

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Paperback | 4 December 2017 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
464 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.91 x 15.72 x 2.2

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Most of us think we know what is meant when we hear the term ?normal," but Cryle and Stephens upend taken-for-granted attitudes about the term. They offer a history of the intellectual and cultural issues that have been at stake in the use of the term since it appeared around 1820. What is taken at one time or any one culture to be ?aberrant" or ?deviant" clearly depends on assumed meanings for norm and normality. The authors of this book explore this history?peppered with a fascinating series of case studies?to make sense of variations on the theme of identity (disability, gender, race, sexuality) in fields organized around identity. They locate the concept in the scientific spheres where it originated in its modern sense and they chart its transformations and developments from the 1820s in France (medicine) to the mid-20th century (Alfred Kinsey). They start with comparative anatomy and other branches of medicine before moving on to consider developments in fields as remote as craniometry, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. It is not enough to say, with David Halperin, that "queer" is ?whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant." Cryle and Stephens move beyond a simple binary opposition between ?normal" and ?abnormality" to give us the whole picture, from the Continent to the U.S., and in all the contexts that distinguish the normal from other available terms (such as typical, average, respectable, conventional, white and heterosexual, and uniform). ?Normality" has had a long struggle to secure its cultural dominance and authority, a story which is told here for the first time.

Industry Reviews

"[Cryle and Stephens's] ambitious book pursues the emergence of statistical thinking from the eighteenth century onwards, the relationship between qualitative and quantitative, and the ways in which normality has been a locus of social control. They examine the word's nearly simultaneous emergence in mathematics and medicine in the nineteenth century; and they trace its entry into popular culture in the mid-twentieth century, when it was the tool of those with commercial interests seeking to standardize mass-produced consumer goods. . . .Their fastidiously gathered evidence proves that normality has always been riddled with internal contradictions. Thus Cryle and Stephens present the etymology and genealogy of a word, the history of an idea, the cultural linguistics through which those threads have become entwined and the sociological ramifications of those subjectivities."

-- "Nature"
"Normality is an indispensable, precise, and nuanced account of the uneven uptake of normality across nineteenth- and twentieth-century medicine, statistics, and consumer culture. Erudite as well as edgy, it shows that the terms and targets of normality have, since their modern emergence, been contested. Arguing that normality thrives on equivocation between the quantitative and the qualitative, the individuating and the standardizing, it persuades with overwhelming evidence that easy critical recourse to the normal/abnormal binary misses the incoherence and versatility that gives normality its enduring cultural power."-- "Valerie Traub, University of Michigan"
"An impressive piece of scholarship for its magnitude and finegrained analysis that brings together key strands from a vast range of knowledge to produce a unified genealogy. . . .[Normality] will make an important contribution to both intellectual and cultural history."-- "Australian Book Review"
"The rise of normativity across a broad range of progressive critical work as an ur-signifier for that which should be resisted has tended to obscure the fact that we don't yet know that much about what it is to be normal. The immense value of Cryle and Stephen's erudite and persuasive work is that it attends painstakingly to normality for the primary reason of understanding it as a phenomenon--its uneven historical emergence, the cultural effects of its conceptual incoherence, and its persistence as a cultural ideal. Working through a series of engaging historical case studies, Normality amply demonstrates the epistemologically rich dividends accrued through the genealogical encounter with the normal."-- "Annamarie Jagose, University of Sydney"

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