Ours is a discursive history that shows how its effects were materialized and institutionalized, how they were productive of new subjectivities and bodies. By doing this work, we are seeking to contribute to, but also to reframe, the insightful political and cultural histories of the normal on which it builds, such as Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body, which shows how the medical treatment of deaf subjects throughout the twentieth century constitutes the enforcement of normative assumptions about hearing, and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson's Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, which introduced and denaturalized the concept of a "normate" body. Cultural historians and scholars of sexuality such as Elizabeth Reiss, Dean Spade, and Alice Domurat Dreger have similarly demonstrated how concepts of the normal have informed the medical and legal treatment of intersex, trans, and conjoined subjects. As Julian Carter observes in the Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880 - 1940, the normal derives its disciplinary force from the way it obscures its political partiality behind an appearance of scientific impartiality. In the late nineteenth century, Carter shows, medical and scientific writing began to adopt the word "normal" as a way to describe "whiteness" and "heterosexuality" in apparently neutral terms, scrubbed free of their political history of violence. Although the normal is veiled by its "appearance of blank emptiness and innocence," Carter notes quite accurately, closer analysis reveals that it "has a long history as a covertly political phenomenon." What this history makes clear, Carter shows, is the extent to which "from its inception, modern 'normality' involved both a positivistic claim about the pure neutrality of facts, and a distinctly eugenic element of judgement about which human bodies and behaviors were best." The norm is a value disguised as a fact, Carter argues - although, as Mary Poovey has shown, the fact itself cannot be understood as neutral or impartial but it is rather inextricable from the political or cultural context in which it came to be recognized as a "fact." The normal, used in its contemporary senses, carries great cultural force. Jeannette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? exemplifies this common understand of the normal as a system of dreary conventionality, showing how the normal functions as a hidden system of compulsory conformity. Despite all this, the normal retains it s privileged cultural position and its discursive poise. Michael Warner has famously contended that normal is what most people aspire to be: "Nearly everyone, it seems, wants to be normal," he writes with brio, "and who can blame them, if the alternative is being abnormal, or deviant, or not being one of the rest of us? Put in those terms, there doesn't seem to be a choice at all. Especially not in America, where normal probably outranks all other social aspirations." (5-6) Cryle, Peter and Elizabeth Stephens. Normality: A Genealogy. The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Jones, Sarah. "David Koch's Monstrous Legacy." The Intelligencer (August 23, 2019)
O'Malley, Sheila. "Present Tense: Matthias Schoenaerts." Film Comment (September 12, 2019)
"Prison Abolition Syllabus 2.0." Black Perspectives (September 8, 2018)
Sutton, Matthew, et al. "Apocalypse Now." Throughline (June 13, 2019) ["Evangelicals have played an important role in modern day American politics - from supporting President Trump to helping elect Jimmy Carter back in 1976. How and when did this religious group become so intertwined with today's political issues? In this episode, what it means to be an evangelical today and how it has changed over time."]
Tafoya, Scout. "3 From Hell." Roger Ebert (September 13, 2019)
"Welfare Reform Syllabus." Black Perspectives (August 24, 2016)
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