Normal
by
When we know that norma is the Latin word for T-square and that normalis means perpendicular, we know almost all that must be known about the area in which the meaning of the terms “norm” and “normal” originated…. A norm, or rule, is what can be used to right, to square, to straighten… to impose a requirement on an existence. —Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (1978), 239. Thinking critically about disability requires exploring the normative order of the social and physical environment that—as Canguilhem suggests—straightens out the lives of disabled people, T-squaring and otherwise measuring some people’s minds, bodies, senses, emotions, and comportments against the rule of normed expectations. Both in everyday life and in the human sciences, “normal” often appears as if it is a static state of affairs, and when people are said to have an unwanted condition, they may be deemed to have an abnormality. Disability studies, in contrast, has shown not only that norms change radically over time and from place to place but also that the seemingly omnipresent commitment to seek and measure the normal is in fact a rather recent historic development (Davis 1995; Garland-Thomson 1997; Stiker 1999; Finkelstein 1998). Still, the...
This essay may be found on page 130 of the printed volume.