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.
"[Cryle and Stephens's] ambitious book pursues the emergence of
statistical thinking from the eighteenth century onwards, the
relationship between qualitative and quantitative, and the ways in
which normality has been a locus of social control. They examine
the word's nearly simultaneous emergence in mathematics and
medicine in the nineteenth century; and they trace its entry into
popular culture in the mid-twentieth century, when it was the tool
of those with commercial interests seeking to standardize
mass-produced consumer goods. . . .Their fastidiously gathered
evidence proves that normality has always been riddled with
internal contradictions. Thus Cryle and Stephens present the
etymology and genealogy of a word, the history of an idea, the
cultural linguistics through which those threads have become
entwined and the sociological ramifications of those
subjectivities."-- "Nature"
"Normality is an indispensable, precise, and nuanced account of the
uneven uptake of normality across nineteenth- and twentieth-century
medicine, statistics, and consumer culture. Erudite as well as
edgy, it shows that the terms and targets of normality have, since
their modern emergence, been contested. Arguing that normality
thrives on equivocation between the quantitative and the
qualitative, the individuating and the standardizing, it persuades
with overwhelming evidence that easy critical recourse to the
normal/abnormal binary misses the incoherence and versatility that
gives normality its enduring cultural power."-- "Valerie Traub,
University of Michigan"
"An impressive piece of scholarship for its magnitude and
finegrained analysis that brings together key strands from a vast
range of knowledge to produce a unified genealogy. . . .[Normality]
will make an important contribution to both intellectual and
cultural history."-- "Australian Book Review"
"The rise of normativity across a broad range of progressive
critical work as an ur-signifier for that which should be resisted
has tended to obscure the fact that we don't yet know that much
about what it is to be normal. The immense value of Cryle and
Stephen's erudite and persuasive work is that it attends
painstakingly to normality for the primary reason of understanding
it as a phenomenon--its uneven historical emergence, the cultural
effects of its conceptual incoherence, and its persistence as a
cultural ideal. Working through a series of engaging historical
case studies, Normality amply demonstrates the epistemologically
rich dividends accrued through the genealogical encounter with the
normal."-- "Annamarie Jagose, University of Sydney"
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