Normality : A Critical Genealogy / Elizabeth Stephens, Peter Cryle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

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

Stephens, Elizabeth, 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.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (447 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

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 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Part I. The Normal in Nineteenth- Century Scientific Thought

Chapter One. The "Normal State" in French Anatomical and Physiological Discourse of the 1820s and 1830s

Chapter Two. "Counting" in the French Medical Academy during the 1830s

Chapter Three. Rethinking Medical Statistics: Distribution, Deviation, and Type, 1840- 1880

Chapter Four. Measuring Bodies and Identifying Racial Types: Physical Anthropology, c. 1860- 1880

Chapter Five. The Dangerous Person as a Type: Criminal Anthropology, c. 1880- 1900

Chapter Six. Anthropometrics and the Normal in Francis Galton's Anthropological, Statistical, and Eugenic Research, c. 1870- 1910

Part II. The Dissemination of the Normal in Twentieth- Century Culture

Chapter Seven. Sex and the Normal Person: Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and Sexual Hygiene Literature, 1870- 1930

Chapter Eight. The Object of Normality: Composite Statues of the Statistically Average American Man and Woman, 1890- 1945

Chapter Nine. Sex and Statistics: The End of Normality

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 22. Okt 2019)

ISBN:

9780226484198

022648419X

OCLC:

1011587032