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Normality : a critical genealogy / Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextPublication details: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, (c)2017.Description: 1 online resource (440 pages) : illustrationsContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • computer
Carrier type:
  • online resource
ISBN:
  • 9780226484198
Subject(s): Genre/Form: LOC classification:
  • B105 .N676 2017
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
Contents:
The "normal state" in French anatomical and physiological discourse of the 1820s and 1830s -- "Counting" in the French medical academy during the 1830s -- Rethinking medical statistics: distribution, deviation and type, 1840-1880 -- Measuring bodies and identifying racial types: physical anthropology, c.1860-1880 -- The dangerous person as a type: criminal anthropology, c. 1880-1900 -- Anthropometrics and the normal in Francis Galton's anthropological, statistical, and eugenic research, c.1870-1910 -- The dissemination of the normal in twentieth-century culture -- Sex and the normal person: sexology, psychoanalysis, and sexual hygiene literature, 1870-1930 -- The object of normality: composite statues of the statistically average American man and woman, 1890-1945 -- Sex and statistics: the end of normality.
Subject: 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 this fields must first have a better understanding of the context of normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does - and doesn't - mean to be normal. --
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Item type Current library Collection Call number URL Status Date due Barcode
Online Book (LOGIN USING YOUR MY CIU LOGIN AND PASSWORD) Online Book (LOGIN USING YOUR MY CIU LOGIN AND PASSWORD) G. Allen Fleece Library ONLINE Non-fiction B105.65 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Link to resource Available on1011587032

Includes bibliographies and index.

The normal in nineteenth-century scientific thought -- The "normal state" in French anatomical and physiological discourse of the 1820s and 1830s -- "Counting" in the French medical academy during the 1830s -- Rethinking medical statistics: distribution, deviation and type, 1840-1880 -- Measuring bodies and identifying racial types: physical anthropology, c.1860-1880 -- The dangerous person as a type: criminal anthropology, c. 1880-1900 -- Anthropometrics and the normal in Francis Galton's anthropological, statistical, and eugenic research, c.1870-1910 -- The dissemination of the normal in twentieth-century culture -- Sex and the normal person: sexology, psychoanalysis, and sexual hygiene literature, 1870-1930 -- The object of normality: composite statues of the statistically average American man and woman, 1890-1945 -- Sex and statistics: the end of normality.

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 this fields must first have a better understanding of the context of normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does - and doesn't - mean to be normal. --

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