Cover of Normality
Normality A Critical Genealogy
by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cloth: 978-0-226-48386-3 | Paper: 978-0-226-48405-1 | Electronic: 978-0-226-48419-8
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. 

In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does—and doesn’t—mean to be normal.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Peter Cryle is emeritus professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is the author or coauthor of many books, including Frigidity: An Intellectual History. Elizabeth Stephens is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Her books include Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present.

REVIEWS

“Cryle and Stephens unsettle our comfortable sense that we know what is meant by ‘normal.’ They provide a series of fascinating historical case studies that enable us to better understand how we came to use a term that has become naturalized and that too often goes unquestioned. This is an extremely timely and important book.”
— Lisa Downing, University of Birmingham

“Normality is an indispensable, precise, and nuanced account of the uneven uptake of normality across nineteenth- and twentieth-century medicine, statistics, and consumer culture. Erudite as well as edgy, it shows that the terms and targets of normality have, since their modern emergence, been contested. Arguing that normality thrives on equivocation between the quantitative and the qualitative, the individuating and the standardizing, it persuades with overwhelming evidence that easy critical recourse to the normal/abnormal binary misses the incoherence and versatility that gives normality its enduring cultural power.”
— Valerie Traub, University of Michigan

“The rise of normativity across a broad range of progressive critical work as an ur-signifier for that which should be resisted has tended to obscure the fact that we don’t yet know that much about what it is to be normal. The immense value of Cryle and Stephen’s erudite and persuasive work is that it attends painstakingly to normality for the primary reason of understanding it as a phenomenon—its uneven historical emergence, the cultural effects of its conceptual incoherence, and its persistence as a cultural ideal. Working through a series of engaging historical case studies, Normality amply demonstrates the epistemologically rich dividends accrued through the genealogical encounter with the normal.”
— Annamarie Jagose, University of Sydney

“An impressive piece of scholarship for its magnitude and finegrained analysis that brings together key strands from a vast range of knowledge to produce a unified genealogy. . . .[Normality] will make an important contribution to both intellectual and cultural history.”
— Australian Book Review

“[Cryle and Stephens's] ambitious book pursues the emergence of statistical thinking from the eighteenth century onwards, the relationship between qualitative and quantitative, and the ways in which normality has been a locus of social control. They examine the word’s nearly simultaneous emergence in mathematics and medicine in the nineteenth century; and they trace its entry into popular culture in the mid-twentieth century, when it was the tool of those with commercial interests seeking to standardize mass-produced consumer goods. . . .Their fastidiously gathered evidence proves that normality has always been riddled with internal contradictions. Thus Cryle and Stephens present the etymology and genealogy of a word, the history of an idea, the cultural linguistics through which those threads have become entwined and the sociological ramifications of those subjectivities.”

— Nature

“This intellectual and cultural history is presented coherently in a form that makes the scientific debates that have been conducted in a wide range of fields over a period of two hundred years accessible to nonspecialists. It provides compelling evidence of the problematic nature of the concept of “normality,” which lacks a consistent and unified history—something the authors claim recent scholarship has failed to take into account.”
— H-Net

“An important look at the emergence and growth of the concept of normality during the modern era.”
— Social History of Medicine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0001
[disability;queer;Michel Foucault;normalization]
The word “normal” was first used scientifically in France around 1820 as a term in comparative anatomy. It did not appear initially as part of a normal-abnormal binary, nor was it defined at the outset by statistical methods, although a contest soon developed between qualitative and quantitative understandings of the term. Controversy and unease attended the development of anthropometrics. During the last four decades of the nineteenth century, scientific techniques of measurement were applied to individual bodies with a view to identifying typical patterns within groups, on the one hand, and atypical or deviant individuals, on the other. Yet even as these practices continued to spread, there was considerable debate about just what might constitute a significant departure from the average. Abnormality was spoken of as a highly problematic notion. Issues raised in the scientific debates of the nineteenth century continued in play at this time, sometimes in remarkably strong ways, even as the theme found its way into other generic places, including public exhibitions, journalistic writing, opinion polls, and sexological studies. In such contexts, discussions of the average, the typical and the normal continued to be quite strenuous. (pages 1 - 20)
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- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0002
[Georges Canguilhem;comparative anatomy;Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire;Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire;teratology;pathology;Georges Cuvier;François-Joseph-Victor Broussais]
The term “normal” first came into usage in French anatomy in the early 1820s. It was used to refer to organs that were fixed in their roles and highly integrated with those around them. In this sense, the normal was not thought as the opposite of the abnormal. It simply referred to a law-governed regularity. A binary usage did emerge a few years later in physiology, where the normal state was opposed to pathological ones. So almost from the outset there was divergence between disciplines about the value of the term. A further question arose in teratology: was it appropriate to think of the normal state as one that simply occurred more frequently than any other, thus allowing monstrosity to be defined by its rarity? In fact some forms of monstrosity were found relatively often, whereas anatomical perfection was a rare thing indeed. These conceptual difficulties proved to be intractable for medical thinking during the 1820s and 1830s. A high-profile debate that took place in 1831 gave a sharp polemical edge to disagreement, but led to no resolution. Even as medical thinkers went on speaking about the normal state, they continued to equivocate between qualitative (law-governed) and quantitative (frequentist) thinking. (pages 23 - 62)
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- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0003
[probability;Jakob Bernoulli;Pierre-Simon Laplace;law of large numbers;Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis;Michel Foucault;Philippe Pinel;averages;Adolphe Quetelet;clinical statistics]
In 1837, a series of debates took place in the French Académie de Médecine. At issue was the relevance or otherwise of “numerical method” to medicine: why count and tabulate illnesses, treatments and therapeutic outcomes? The opponents of numerical method argued that to count illnesses or patients was in fact to suppose that all were fundamentally the same, whereas the true art of clinical medicine involved treating each patient as a discrete individual. Numbers were in that sense inimical to the synthesizing power of the doctor’s medical glance, which perceived what was required in each case. To count patients, illnesses and treatments was to suppose, absurdly, that there might be such a thing in practice as an average patient or an average illness. The calculus of probabilities ought to be applied only to such things as games of chance, said the anti-numerists. The numerists struggled to defend their ostensibly progressive position. Analysis of this debate shows that the emergence of a discourse about the role of normalizing averages in the medical field was cognate with the emergence of a militant counter-discourse refusing to allow that mathematical forms of knowledge might be properly applied to living beings. (pages 63 - 99)
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- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0004
[Adolphe Quetelet;Average Man;moral statistics;distribution;binomial curve;Louis-Adolphe Bertillon;smallpox vaccine]
When the prominent Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet turned his attention in 1846 to uses of statistics in medicine, he observed that doctors were practicing statistics in undisciplined ways. By simply “counting,” he said, they were not establishing predictable links between causes and their effects, and were therefore failing to identify appropriate forms of treatment. The doctors who had defended numerical method in the 1837 debate had in fact failed to understand statistical thinking. To show what might be achieved, Quetelet put forward the the so-called “binomial curve” as a way of analyzing distributions in which a range of individuals were located with respect to a mid point and considered in terms of their distance from it. In the late 1850s, the use of medical statistics became a matter of widespread concern when specious statistical arguments were used to claim that smallpox vaccination had led to a rise in mortality rates among people of mature age. Those arguments were refuted by Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, who used the opportunity to redefine key terms, notably that of the average, in ways pertinent to medicine. (pages 100 - 141)
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- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0005
[physical anthropology;craniometry;heredity;race;type;Paul Broca]
One of the key purposes of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, established in 1859, was to build a science of hereditary normality. The favoured procedure was to constitute statistically ordered anthropological series that would gather individuals belonging to natural hereditary groups. Much of the society’s effort went into craniometry since members considered the skull to be the stable locus of normality. When it came to establishing series that would allow normal characters to be identified and measured, they tended to exclude abnormal individuals from the outset, thus following a problematic procedure. As they occasionally realized, they ought to have included everyone before determining by calculation what would count statistically as normal. Some other key notions were also subject to contestation. Certain members argued that the actual measurement of freshly removed brains was more valuable to science than craniometry. Others pointed out that, as physical anthropologists committed to identifying racial characters, they did not in fact have a shared theory of race. It proved extremely difficult to reconcile precise anthropometric methods with generalizing claims about natural types. The anthropology of race needed both measurements and types, but struggled to hold them together in theory and in practice. (pages 142 - 179)
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    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0006
[criminal anthropology;Cesare Lombroso;Léonce Manouvrier;atavism]
The classification of deviant individuals became a major concern in Italy toward the end of the nineteenth century. The scuola positiva of criminal anthropology led by Cesare Lombroso sought to identify born criminals by anthropometric means. Sustained efforts were made by the school to characterize various kinds of deviants—not just criminals, but the insane, epileptics and alcoholics—as throwbacks to earlier stages of human evolution. By contrast with the French physical anthropologists considered in Chapter Four, Lombroso and his colleagues, at least during a prolonged initial phase, did not engage directly with the question of normality. In that sense, it was not at all clear how deviancy could actually be defined from first principles. Members of the school supposed that deviants, rather than being defined by their distance from the natural type of the species, actually constituted a type in their own right. Normal man had not figured in Lombroso’s major treatise on criminal man, but in his later work on criminal woman the normal was in fact taken as a point of reference. The significance of that shift is examined, along with debates in and around criminal anthropology. (pages 180 - 211)
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- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0007
[eugenics;Francis Galton;composite photography;normal distribution]
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the word normal did not yet have a strongly statistical meaning. It did not become fully elaborated as a statistical term until the turn of the century. This elaboration is widely attributed to Francis Galton, through his theorization of the concept normal distribution, which he did not name as such until the final years of the 1800s. In the first decade of the twentieth century, then, the normal remained what it had been throughout the nineteenth century: a specialized term whose use was confined almost exclusively to the professional discourses of anatomy, biology and anthropology. This chapter reads Galton’s photographic experiments with composite portraiture as exemplary of the ways, and the contexts, in which the word normal began to appear in popular culture and everyday speech. Although composite portraiture was never a successful part of Galton’s scientific research, it was one of his key research methods, and can be traced across his research in anthropology, statistics and eugenics. (pages 212 - 258)
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- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0008
[sexology;psychoanalysis;sexual hygiene;Freud;Krafft-Ebing]
At the end of the nineteenth century, the word normal began to be taken up and used with increasing frequency and conceptual centrality in a new body of literature, commonly characterized by its authors as the scientific study of human sexuality. These texts were produced in the context of a diverse range of fields, most of which were broadly medical in approach, including psychology, psychiatry, sexology, psychoanalysis, public health and marital advice literature. Together, the books published in this field in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth constituted an important site at which the idea of the normal began to be elaborated in more detail, and to occupy a more central conceptual place than it had in any of the fields examined in the previous chapters. The idea of the normal that emerged from the new fields of sexology, psychoanalysis, sexual hygiene and popular sex advice manuals was not a quantitative one, but rather one that saw the state of normality as a volatile and elusive one. (pages 261 - 293)
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- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0009
[composite statues;public health exhibitions;statistically average bodies;self-measurement;self-improvement]
Between 1893 and 1945, three sets of composite statues were produced in the United States. The first set was commissioned in 1893 by Dudley Allen Sargent for the Chicago World Fair, with dimensions modeled from the average measurements of young white American college men and women. He called these statues the “Typical American Male and Female.” A subsequent composite statue was made in 1921 by Jane Davenport and modelled from her father Charles Davenport’s anthropometrics collection of soldiers mobilized and demobilized during the First World War. Called the “Average Young American Male,” this statue was first exhibited as part of 1922 International Congress on Eugenics. A final set of composite statues, made by the gynaecologist Robert Latou Dickenson in collaboration with the artist Albram Belskie, became the feature exhibit at the opening of America’s first permanent health museum in 1945. They were named Norma and Normann. These three sets of composite statues represent three different ways of understanding the statistically average body in the first half of the twentieth century: as typical, average, and normal. This chapter examines the role these statues played in popularizing a new idea of the normal. (pages 294 - 332)
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- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0010
[sexual behaviour;normal sexuality;statistical social research;Alfred Kinsey]
The publication of the two Kinsey reports on human sexuality in the middle of the twentieth century was widely hailed as the first study of “normal” sexuality. His approach to the study of sexual behaviour marked a shift from that found in sexology and psychoanalysis. These had made very little use of statistics. Their approach was narrative, not quantitative; the concept of the normal that underlined their work was medical rather than mathematical. Kinsey’s work applied to the study of sexuality the statistical methods developed as part of the anthropometric projects examined in the previous chapters. Yet Kinsey himself was highly critical of the concept of the normal. The history of the normal in the 1950s is not, as is often assumed, simply the history of its increasing cultural dominance and ubiquity. Rather, the cultural processes by which the term normal became so ubiquitous and powerful in the mid-century need to be understood as intricately connected with those by which it became a subject of debate, resistance, and even outright rejection. (pages 333 - 352)
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- Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Stephens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226484198.003.0011
[normalization;standardization;critique]
In each of the chapters of this book, we have seen that the term and concept of the normal emerges in the context of entrenched, and often unresolved, debate. Debate about the normal is constitutive of the concept of the normal, rather than something that problematizes an otherwise stable understanding. Critiques of the normal, or identifications of a disjunct between an idealized concept of normality and lived experiences, have always played an important role in the history of the term and its conceptualization. The history of the normal is not the history of its unqualified or unchallenged dominance, or even its unstoppable emergence as a powerful cultural dynamic, but rather the history of unrelenting arguments about its status and utility. (pages 353 - 360)
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