Normality: A Critical Genealogy by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens (review)

Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens spent six years charting the process through which the concept of the "normal" acquired cultural authority. The resulting triple argument is largely compelling. First, they demonstrate that our contemporary understanding of normality consolidated quite recently, dating only from the end of the Second World War. Second, they show that the concept of normality—far from the dominant social force many of us have imagined—has long been contested and negotiated, especially over its muddled relation to concepts of the healthy, the average, and the ideal. Finally, they connect normality's mid-twentieth-century force to the rise of a consumer culture and the data society on which it rested.

The book's nine chapters dig into two centuries of argumentation in multiple distinct professional fields, including mathematics, medicine, sociology, anatomy, physical anthropology, eugenics, and sexology. These conversations feature names familiar to scholars of sexuality and race: Cuvier and Quetelet, Lombroso and Galton, Krafft-Ebing and Davenport, Stopes and Kinsey. What sets this account apart is not only Cryle and Stephens's inclusion of many lesser-known figures but also the extraordinary detail with which the authors contextualize their subjects' contributions in relation to professional and, later, popular debate. We learn that early nineteenth-century French doctors and mathematicians squabbled over the clinical relevance and role of observation, intuition, and numerical method and how their disagreements were strategically articulated as bids for authority in the intensely competitive professional culture of the Académie de médecine. We gain a sense of the technical and discursive developments through which mid-nineteenth-century French physical anthropologists explored the distribution of physical characteristics that they believed established the existence of human racial groups. A chapter on Francis Galton explores his use of visual anthropometry and photographic technology at the turn of the century. Together, the first six chapters establish that nineteenth-century medical and mathematical thinking diverged in their assessment of the healthy and the average as distinct bodily states.

The final chapters turn to the history of sexuality from the 1870s to the 1950s. Chapter 7 addresses sexology, psychoanalysis, and sexual hygiene literature from 1870 to 1930. Cryle and Stephens concur with earlier scholars in arguing that in this period the concept of normality both broadened conceptually (without achieving anything like coherence) and emerged in popular discourses to describe individual adaptation to the stresses and uncertainties of an urbanizing, industrializing society. Chapter 8 focuses tightly on composite statues representing statistically average bodies between 1890 and 1945, arguing that such figures point to cultural issues arising in relation to mass production and consumer capitalism. Finally, chapter 9 looks at the impact of the Kinsey reports, which combined statistical thinking and methods with a fundamental rejection of the concept of normality as a meaningful descriptor for human sexual behavior.

The book's amassed evidence is deep and supports its core argument well. Its comprehensive thoroughness in research and exposition should make it a useful reference work for historians in a number of subfields. Yet despite its scope and a degree of granulation that will seem excessive to many readers, it leaves some important framing, methodological, and theoretical questions unaddressed. I wanted more discussion of the authors' decision to focus so very tightly on professional debates, which seems out of keeping with their conclusion that our contemporary concept of the normal formed in relation to "the office and suburban home" (351). Does that landing place not suggest that the genealogy of normality should engage labor history and the history of mass and popular culture? I also wanted a clearer integration of the first six chapters' European focus to the American focus of the last three. How, for instance, might we understand the impact of urbanization and industrialization on the nineteenth-century French medical, anthropometric, and statistical debates, so lovingly detailed?

Gender receives only passing acknowledgment. Yet surely the management...