The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era

Notes

137 Notes Preface 1. i am professor of english in the college of arts and sciences, professor of disability and human development in the college of applied health sciences, and professor of medical education in the college of Medicine. Chapter 1 1 Lennard J. davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (new york and London: verso, 1995), chapter 1. 2. see Walter benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Diversity and Ignore Inequality (new york: Metropolitan books, 2006), for more on the relationship of diversity to neoliberalism. 3. i don’t have the space to elaborate this point here, but neoliberal advertising stresses the idea of belonging to a niche group rather than the quality, superiority, or price of the thing to be consumed. Pepsi originated this type of advertising based on lifestyle in the early 1960s, overturning its older ad, which stressed size and lower price (compared to coke). The phrase “the Pepsi generation” used in the ad implied that if you drank their product, you would be associated with youth and vigor. our current advertising is designed to appeal to niche markets (many diverse markets) and to suggest that using an apple product will associate you with a cohort made up of people who believe what you believe. in contrast, for example, roland barthes’s analysis of the semiology of advertising (which he did before lifestyle ads became in vogue) suggests that either effectiveness or nationality was important in soap ads and in pasta commercials. The “italianness” of the product didn’t make the eater more italian; it suggested that italians know better than anyone how to make pasta and that as a french person you might want to eat products that can best suggest “italianness.” in short, old-style capitalism wanted to suggest you buy its product because it was the best or most affordable one; neocapitalism suggests you’d like to be part of a particular diverse group, and consuming a product might help you do that. 138 • Notes to Pages 3–11 4. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (oxford: oxford University Press, 1995), 121. 5. Manfred b. steger and ravi K. roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (oxford: oxford University Press, 2010), 11. 6. steger and roy, Neoliberalism, 53. 7. georgio agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. daniel heller-roazen (stanford: stanford University Press, 1998). 8. however, a new trend in posthuman thought, expressed by stacy alaimo, Jasbir Puar, Theresa de Lauretis, and victoria Pitts-Taylor, among others, suggests that feminists and foucauldians, for example, have erred in one direction by stressing the totally constructed nature of the body. They point to a return to the body, its materiality, as a recuperative corrective, although they don’t wish to be naïve about that materiality. 9. for more on this subject, see dorothy roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (new york: new Press, 2011). 10. victoria Pitts-Taylor, Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture (new Jersey: rutgers University Press, 2007. 11. Lennard J. davis and david Morris, “The biocultures Manifesto,” originally published in New Literary History, appearing in this volume as chapter 9. 12. see gilles deleuze and felix guattari, Nomads; Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages : Homonationalism in Queer Times (chapel hill: duke University Press, 2007). 13. eva Kittay points out in a yet unpublished paper that normal may not always be good, as when an older person has the blood pressure of a twenty-year-old. This is true, but that kind of outcome is still normal in the sense of good and healthy. 14. see the icarus Project: navigating the space between brilliance and Madness at http://www.theicarusproject.net 15. except in the case of “wannabes” or what some people call “transability.” Those who fit into this category want to be disabled, although they are not, and so might either choose to amputate limbs or choose to live in the manner of a disabled person. The point is that this is a lifestyle choice that fits nicely into the neoliberal paradigm for diverse bodies i’ve articulated. 16. giorgio agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin attell (chicago: University of chicago Press, 2005), 40. 17. agamben, State of Exception, 40. 18. Michael a. Peters, Poststructuralism, Marxism, and Neoliberalism: Between Theory and Politics (Lanham, Md: rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 124. 19. i am not speaking here of the obvious fact that all identities have an...