The pharmacist handed over my prescription for an antibiotic to deal with my yearly
strep, smiled, and said, “This should get you back to normal in no time”.
Though this is not an uncommon phrase, nor was it the first time I had heard it, I
stopped short and gave her a second look. It was then that I realized as a Ph.D. student
of Disability Studies, I have come to understand this word as a judgment and an
idealized state of living - in constant opposition to abnormal. I am immersed in the daily
discourse surrounding the conceptualization of “normal”... But, what is normal? How did
this word come to represent our standard? And was the pharmacist making an innocent
statement… or falling into an ableist assumption of my reality?
Lennard Davis (2013), an international author, historian, and disability scholar
suggests that we live in a world of norms and use it in all aspects of our daily lives as a
measurement to rank intelligence, weight, health, etc. along a contextual line from
subnormal to above average (1). He further explains the history of “norm” originating as
a carpenter’s square to mean “perpendicular” and entering the English language to our
current understanding as “conforming to” or “regular” in the mid-1800s. French
statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1847) applied the astronomer's “average law of
errors” for plotting star sightings to “average human bodies” and then conceptualized
the abstract “average man”. It was here that early statisticians (almost all eugenicists)
applied the “new” representation of the bell curve to the average human body (Davis pp.
4-5). A bell curve, by definition, has extremes with the mean or average in the center
(visual by Dr. Saul McLeod). With the introduction of standard deviation and quartiles,
the bell curve was divided into four sections and attributed with hierarchical low and
high standards. The high standard became our idealized “normal” providing eugenicist
justification of a “pure race” through extermination, and discrimination….and the
opposite extreme became “abnormal” or disabled (Davis pp.4-5).
Visual statistical representation By Dr. Saul McLeod, published in 2019 (A blue bell curve-shaped
mountain, divided into 6 sections labeled as “underperforming” on the far left, “meets expectations” at the
top of the curve, and “excellent performance” to the far right. Human caricatures performing various
activities are aligned with each numerical representation along the “X” axis.
American Disability Studies writer and activist Eli Clare (2017) also positions “normal” in
opposition to “abnormal,” suggesting white Western cultural dominance of worthy over
unworthy, and whole over broken (23). He sees “normal” as a tool for oppression by
which individuals are labeled and tagged without question or hesitation, defining paths
and positions of education, incarceration, institutionalization, and sterilization ( 23).
So then, how do we understand “normal” and why was I questioning the pharmacist’s
statement? The term has become common and is used without a second thought, but it
can also be understood as a bias, exclusionary, and judgemental. Disability Scholars
have questioned the validity of normal, reiterating its instability and fluidity as society
also changes and evolves. Davis further suggests it is the task of Disability Scholars to
create alternatives to and question the construction of normalcy, and not just include
disability as part of normal (12).
As one who identifies as disabled, “normal” will probably always make me turn my head
and wonder…but I write this in hope of a greater understanding of the potential for
negative connotations - and the acknowledgment of my own biases against the word.
Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Duke University Press, 2017.
Davis, Lennard J. "Introduction: Normality, Power, and Culture.” The Disability Studies
Reader 4, 2013, pp.1-14.
McLeod, S. A. (2019, May 28). Introduction to the normal distribution (bell curve).
Simply psychology: https://www.simplypsychology.org/normal-distribution.html
