Constructing Normalcy

Sarah Tuberty

In my last post I commented on the urge towards normalcy- and how so many of us are not in fact this ideal of "normalcy" - yet all of us work to uphold these unattainable social constructs.

It reminded me of the opening chapter in Lennard J. Davis's "Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body." This is an exceptional work (however it is- very academic - and not a super quick read)

Davis's opening chapter begins with building the definition of "normalcy" and leads the reader to early western though patterns. Davis describes painters of the early 1400's would paint "ideal" beauty in women, such as Botticelli's "Birth of Venus." This is a hypothetical, most beautiful woman of the time- yet it was not made of one woman- it is rather a collection of all of the most beautiful parts of all of these other women that were combined to make this most ideal person. It was understood that this person was unattainable, rather it was divine- no single human woman had these features. On the contrary Davis introduces the term "grotesque" and how all of humanity by default had a "grotesque" body - since it was impossible for us to have these divinely ideal bodies. Grotesque was not originally associated with disability - rather grotesque applied to all of humanity- to separate us from the divine.

Then with the rise of statistics in 1750's - there rose this thought pattern of measuring populations and disease- of aligning these numbers and finding the averages- which by default meant there were outliers, or pieces at the end of bell curve. With this logic, instead of having the "ideal" or "divine" body as not attainable- it rather became situated in the center of the bell curve, and all of human variation floated around it. Davis argues that statistics made the divine and unattainable the most normal body. This then forces all of humanity to align along this bell curve, which then puts disability on the fringes- since our bodies and our minds do not fit these ideals more so than non-disabled bodies and minds. We then become "defectives" (rude right?). Grotesque - in stead of referring to all of humanly, rather became associated with these disabled bodies and minds.

It just fascinates me how this shift changed, and has had a hold on western thought for nearly 300 years. How can we best dismantle this? What is needed to progress western thought to be more aligned with the truths that human variation is much broader than what fits neatly under the bell curve?

Here is chapter 1, Constructing Normalcy, that I found online- check out the full book if you like it!

Enforcing Normalcy