Numbering normal

Abstract

In 1998, thousands of men and women in the United States woke up and found themselves changed. These individuals may have felt the same as they did the day before. They may have got out of bed, showered, made breakfast and driven to work as if it were any other day. Yet overnight they had become overweight. Some had become obese, others morbidly so. Still more had moved from the underweight category to become 'normal'. What kind of drastic vicissitudes had been realised to change so many bodies so rapidly? A sudden increase in nocturnal sleep-related eating disorders? Icing sugar falling like snow from the night sky? No: the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had changed the way the way that it measured Body Mass Index (BMI). Previously the United States had classified men with a BMI of 27.8 or above and women with a BMI of 27.3 or above as overweight. However, in 1998 it shifted the measurement down to 25, to fall in line with the World Health Organization's (WHO) standardised classification system and to allow for easier calculability. 1 In one fell swoop thousands more people in the US were obese. The media responded with panicked commentary about the obesity epidemic, without mentioning the artificial inflation of these new statistics. But why would they? It is perfectly natural to trust in the classification systems of scientists. Yet this example demonstrates that the thresholds of normalcy that we rely on for the classification of health are more fluid that we might imagine. In this book I argue that our bodies have been changed by measurement technology. Our capabilities and parameters have been defined so that we-youshift from states of normalcy to disability at the whim of mercurial thresholds. Disability history fascinates because it forces us to ask questions about our universal lived experience and how we ascribe meaning and significance to certain attributes and values. What should we be capable of ?