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c h a p t e r s e v e n Thoughts on the Desire for Normality Eva Feder Kittay, Ph.D. The desire for normality—not what normality is, but our desire for it—is the subject of this chapter. The various procedures for surgically shaping children that are discussed in this volume all appear to presume that what is normal is desirable, what is not normal is to be avoided. The price of normalcy and the cost of avoiding what is not normal are high, especially when surgical procedures, often repeated, are intrusive , painful, time-consuming, emotionally wrenching, minimally helpful in improving the body’s functionality (and sometimes, as in the case of genital surgery, impede function),and expensive.Against all these material and emotional costs are placed the advantages of normalcy, or at least the appearance of normalcy. In this chapter, I will not try to assess whether the desire for normalcy weighs heavily enough rationally and morally to justify the efforts to achieve (the semblance of) normalcy. Instead, I will explore what the desire is, and from whence it comes. As I contend that the desire for the normal is a powerful one, not easily swayed by a rational weighing of costs and benefits, I believe it is important to consider what means there are to satisfy that desire without necessarily acquiescing to the norm implied in the standard of the normal . This is especially important when the attempt to meet that norm is potentially destructive for the individual, the family, and, arguably, the larger society. To begin, it is helpful to evoke the desire for normality in order to fix on what such a desire is. The evocation is easy enough, especially when one feels that one’s life is not normal, or not normal now. At such a time, one often finds oneself yearning for what one supposes is the safety, the comfort, the uncomplicated nature of what one supposes is the normal. Or one evokes a time of stability or order, or a time when expectations and predictions were less tenuous than in times we think of as other than normal. Who among us would claim to have a normal life? For my part, I’m not sure that my life has ever been normal—and that is, in fact, the reason I consented to write a chapter about something about which I hold no pretensions of expertise. Doubtless Thoughts on the Desire for Normality 91 most of us can claim features of ourselves or our history that fall outside the norm taken in either the descriptive or prescriptive sense, and I, at least, can point to features of my own life that are genuine outliers. As a child of two Holocaust survivors and an immigrant at the age of 6, my life as a child was marked by a singularity and a silence.In the late 1940s,1950s,and even well into the 1960s,the Holocaust was rarely a subject of discussion in the general culture of the United States. If it was spoken of outside my home and our close circle of friends and relatives, it was in hushed tones. The experiences of the war and the pain and horror of Nazi crimes were too difficult to be assimilated into the cultural fabric of everyday life; the war, directly experienced here only by the returning GIs, was at once remote and frighteningly close, for soldiers who had been in the war were found in most all families. In the decade that followed , the 1950s, normality was deeply sought and deeply desired. Young men and women had had an early adulthood interrupted by a devastating war. War never is normal—it disrupts normality. After a war, people desperately want a return to stability and normality. I suggest that if the 1950s was a socially conservative, even socially repressive period in that the range of the normal was highly constricted, that if it was a time marked by conformity and concerns about conformity, it was because all that was regarded to be outside the normal—be it a revolutionary philosophy, an atypical sexuality, a deviant body, an unruly mind, a history of brutality, and surely grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins sent to gas chambers—all these were banished from sight and from memory so that life could assume a predictability and stability that contrasted with war conditions. The uneventful and unexceptional were celebrated. Racial and ethnic differences were...

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