The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era

One: The End of Normal

Chapter One The End of Normal i begin with not only a counterintuitive claim but also one, for those familiar with my work, that will seem a form of self-heresy. if we are now living in an identity-culture eschaton in which people are asking whether we are “beyond identity,” then could this development be related in some significant way to the demise of the concept of “normality”? is it possible that normal, in its largest sense, which has done such heavy lifting in the area of eugenics, scientific racism, ableism, gender bias, homophobia, and so on, is playing itself out and losing its utility as a driving force in culture in general and academic culture in particular? and if normal is being decommissioned as a discursive organizer, what replaces it? i will argue that in its place the term diverse serves as the new normalizing term. another way of putting this point, somewhat tautologically, is that diversity is the new normality. before i explain what i mean, i am obliged to lay out for those not familiar with my work what i have asserted in the past. in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body i argued that normalcy was a category that had been and is enforced in our culture. i argued that the rise of the concept of normality was tied to the rise of eugenics, statistics, and certain kinds of scientific claims about the human body, race, gender, class, intelligence, strength, fitness, and morality. i pointed out that the development in the nineteenth century of the concept of the normal person (l’homme moyen) by adolphe Quetelet and of the bell curve by sir francis galton acted as both scientific and a cultural imperatives socializing people to find their comfort zone under the reassuring yet disturbing concept of normality. extremes would be considered abnormal and therefore undesirable. galton’s genius was to change the bell curve to an ogive in which the extreme right 2 • THE END OF NORMAL side would flip upward and cease being the area of the abnormal. rather the fourth or fifth quintile would become the location of very desirable traits—in his case, height, strength, intelligence, and even beauty.1 galton devised the ogive or the notion of quintiles because in actuality he was not promoting normality in the sense of being average—since that could also be another name for mediocrity. rather, he was promoting eugenic betterment of the human race by encouraging the mating of people who had a kind of enhanced normality—which i have called “hypernormality .” galton used the concept of the normal curve and normality to camouflage what he actually wanted, which was a bigger, smarter, stronger, more dominant human being that corresponded with the putative traits of the dominant social and political classes in a racialized and sexist society. seeming to be an ideology of democracy and utilitarianism, the norm actually acted as a rationale for rule by elites. doing that double work of appearing to maintain democratic ideals while promoting a new kind inequality, the concept of normality held powerful sway for more than 150 years. it has worked very nicely to consolidate the power of nations, institutions, bodies, and cultures over weaker entities, institutions, bodies, and cultures. The mythos of the normal body has created the conditions for the emergence and subjection of the disabled body, the raced body, the gendered body, the classed body, the geriatric body—and so on. and the idea of normal was an effective rationale for a monocultural society that could define itself as the norm and standard. immigrants, indigenous peoples, people of color, and foreigners were always going to be abnormal and were “proven” to be so using eugenically oriented biometric tests and measures. i am not saying all that is over. The replacement of diverse for normal is a process of uneven development. nor am i saying this is a bad thing. The idea of diversity has many things to recommend it over the concept of normal. on the surface we are better off abandoning some universal standard for bodies and cultures and acknowledging that there isn’t one regnant or ideal body or culture—that all are in play concerning each other and should be equally valued. diversity is in fact a much more democratic concept than normality since diversity applies to the broad range of the population unlike normality, which of course eschews the abnormal. but it would be naive to see diversity...