Normality : a critical genealogy / Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cryle, P. M. (Peter Maxwell), 1946- author.

Stephens, Elizabeth, 1969- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Norm (Philosophy)--History.

Norm (Philosophy).

Social sciences--Europe, Western--History--20th century.

Social sciences.

Social sciences--Europe, Western--History--19th century.

Social sciences--United States--History--20th century.

Social sciences--United States--History--19th century.

Medicine--France--History--19th century.

Medicine.

History.

France.

Western Europe.

United States.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

440 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Summary:

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 la 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

The normal in nineteenth-century scientific thought

The "normal state" in anatomical and physiological discourse of the 1820s and 1830s

"Counting" in the French medical academy during the 1830s

Rethinking medical statistics: distribution, deviation and type, 1840-1870

Measuring bodies and identifying racial types, c.1860-1880

The dangerous person as a type: criminal anthropology, c. 1880-1900

Anthropometrics and the normal in Francis Galton's anthropological, statistical and eugenic research, c.1870-1910

The dissemination of the normal in twentieth-century culture

Sex and the normal person: sexology, psychoanalysis and sexual hygiene literature, 1870-1930

The object of normality: composite statues of the statistically average American man and woman, 1890-1945

Sex and statistics: the end of normality.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226483863

022648386X

9780226484051

022648405X

OCLC:

962442428