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The Tyranny of "Normalcy"

By Lennard J. Davis

The fact that disability and normality can be looked at as sociohistorical concepts is crucial to disability studies, since the alternativ paradigms--the medical and rehabilitation models--presume that disability is a universal constant. These models have been operating (literally) on disabled people for more than 150 years. The medical model treats disability as a disease in need of a cure, while the rehabilitation model sees it as a body in need of repair, concealment, remediation and supervision, but the constructionist model sees disability as a social process in which no inherent meanings attach to physical difference other than those assigned by a community. An impairment only becomes a disability when the ambient society creates environments with barriers--affective, sensory, cognitive or architectural.

Even within the disability rights movement itself, notions about who falls into the category of the "disabled" are unclear. For example, many deaf activists do not consider themselves disabled. Rather, the deaf think of themselves as a linguistic minority like Latinos or Asians, who are defined by their use of a language other than the dominant one in the United States. Eighty-seven percent of respondents to a questionnaire created by Deaf Life magazine said they did not consider themselves handicapped, and 8 out of 10 deaf people said they did not want cochlear implants to help them hear. Deaf scholars argue that their "problem" is not that they are deficient, but that the society at large does not know, nor does it care to know, how to speak American Sign Language.

Disability scholars want to examine the constructed nature of concepts like "normalcy" and to defamiliarize them. The use of the word normal in reference to physical bodies appeared in English merely 150 years ago, coinciding with the birth of statistics and eugenics. Before the 19th century in Western culture the concept of the "ideal" was the regnant paradigm in relation to bodies, and so all bodies were less than ideal. The introduction of the concept of normality, however, created an imperative to be normal, as the eugenics movement proved by enshrining the bell curve as the umbrella under whose demanding peak we should all stand. With the introduction of the bell curve came the notion of "abnormal bodies." 

And the rest is history, including the Nazis' willing adoption of the state-of-the-art eugenics funded and developed by British and American scientists. The devastating result was the creation of procedures for exterminating deaf and disabled people, procedures which were later used on the Jews, gypsies and other "degenerate" races. But the Nazis were only the most visible (and reviled) tip of an iceberg that continues quite effectively to drive humans into daily frenzies of consuming, reading, viewing, exercising, testing, dieting and so on--all in pursuit of the ultimate goal of being considered normal.

Disability studies demands a shift from the ideology of normalcy to a vision of the body as changeable, unperfectable, unruly and untidy. Philosopher Susan Wendell provides a rationale for the disability perspective: "Not only do physically disabled people have experiences which are not available to the able-bodied, they are in a better position to transcend cultural mythologies about the body, because they cannot do things the able-bodied feel they must do in order to be happy, 'normal' and sane. . . . If disabled people were truly heard, an explosion of knowledge of the human body and psyche would take place."

Adapted from Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions by Lennard J. Davis (New York University Press, 2002). Professor Davis, the son of deaf parents, teaches in the departments of English and Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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