On Empire of Normality
Created: 2024-02-06 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-13 (16:56:08)Status: completed
A history of “normality” as a concept that formed and mutated with changing social structures and hierarchies. Empire of Normality argues that normality is not an objective measure; rather, it has served to reify emergent or existing hierarchies in ability, social class, gender and race. Through this lens the book traces the history of the normal, from Adolphe Quetelet’s nineteenth century statistical “average man,” through Francis Dalton’s development of eugenics and through the rise of postindustrial capitalism.
The consistent thread through these different historical manifestations of normality is the notion that it is possible to define and measure a physical or mental norm for the population, from which individuals may deviate to greater or lesser degrees. For the eugenics movement, which also commited to the idea that the species could be improved at the population level, the endpoint was mass sterilisation and murder of people considered inferior. Chapman demonstrates that even if our societies have outwardly disavowed eugenics since the end of the Second World War, we are still organised around a “pathology paradigm” that ranks individuals in terms of their mental and physical functioning against a statistical norm.
Chapman argues that in the context of twenty-first century capitalism, this paradigm is used in the construction of the neurotypical and neurodivergent populations, alternately for labour exploitation or as a non-working surplus from which profits may yet be extracted. This parallels (and explicitly cites) the arguments developed in Adler-Bolton and Vierkant’s Health Communism, and comes to the same conclusion: the interests of the working class and the surplus are one and the same.
To this end, while the book highlights the recent wins of the neurodiversity movement, it argues that neurodivergent liberation is not possible to achieve within capitalism. The final chapter signposts potential practices for a neurodivergent Marxism, including neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergent workers and the wider organisation of the surplus as surplus alongside the working class (again, mirroring the closing arguments if Health Communism), building on existing practices within health politics and scientific research, and decolonising neurodivesity theory.
See also
References
- Adler-Bolton, Beatrice, and Artie Vierkant, 2022, Health Communism, Verso Books
Endmatter
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