A01=Elizabeth Stephens
A01=Peter Cryle
anatomy
anthropometrics
Author_Elizabeth Stephens
Author_Peter Cryle
balanced condition
case studies
Category=NH
criminal anthropology
criminals
cultural history
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eugenics
france
gender
genealogy
good health
historical research
medical fields
medicine
normality
orderly function
philosophy
physiological discourse
psychoanalysis
scientific terms
sexology
sexuality
social sciences
sociology
statistics
Product details
- ISBN 9780226484051
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Peter Cryle is emeritus professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is the author or coauthor of many books, including Frigidity: An Intellectual History. Elizabeth Stephens is associate professor of culture studies and deputy head of school (research) in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University, Australia. She is the author of Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present.
