The 200 year history of the notion of ‘normal’ and its power to alienate and oppress
Before the nineteenth century, the term ‘normal’ was hardly ever associated with human behaviour. Normal was a term used in maths: people weren’t normal, right angles were.
But from the 1830s, the science of the normal took off across Europe and North America, with a proliferation of IQ tests, sex studies, a census of hallucinations, even a UK beauty map. Sarah Chaney investigates the surprising history of how the very notion of the normal came about and has shaped us all, often while entrenching oppressive values.
She looks at why we’re still asking the internet: Do I have a normal body? Is my sex life normal? Are my kids normal? And along the way, she challenges why we ever thought it might be a desirable thing to be.
Dr Sarah Chaney is a research fellow at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, University of London. She spent her teens and twenties furiously rebelling against the mainstream, while secretly longing to be normal. Her most recent book Am I Normal? The 200-Year Search for Normal People (And Why They Don’t Exist) was published in 2022.
‘Sarah Chaney’s excellent Am I Normal? is one of those rare popular science books that make you look at the whole world differently.’
Tim Smith-Laing, Daily Telegraph
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