The end of normal – identity in a biocultural era

Abstract

The book consists of 10 chapters. In eight of them, the author, Lennard J. Davis, Professor of English at the University of Illinois and editor of several editions of the Disability Studies Reader, mostly rethinks or reconsiders concepts and theories coined by either him or other scholars. A ninth is also a rebut ut this time a reprint. Davis addresses several issues related to the notion of normality, and this makes the book engaging to read. The author is a scholar with an impressive level of knowledge, making some parts of the book somewhat demanding, at least it was for this reader. However, the greatest challenge is that since the author either rethinks or reconsiders concepts or theories the reader should have some basic knowledge about these concepts and theories, aside from how Davis present them in this book. I will first give a brief outline of the book, with some comments. Then, I will comment in more detail on his first chapter, The End of Normal (no question mark), since this is where he deals most extensively with the notion of normal. The book opens with a rethinking of his own ideas of normality, previously presented in the book Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body from 1995. Davis now argues that 'normality' is no longer the major defining term in social organization; instead, he claims that 'diversity' is a more suitable term, doing the work that the term normal used to do in sorting and ordering groups and populations. In Chapter 2, Davis rethinks concept of 'dismodernism', originally coined in order to bridge the gap between postmodernism and disability and to question the notion of discrete identities. The concept has been met with some critique. As a rejoinder to his critics, Davis elaborates on his understanding of the concept. Chapter 3 addresses identity in a more cultural vein and asks whether the physical or psychological identity of actors, in both films and television, should play any role in casting an actor/actress for a specific role. Should, for the most part, disabled actors play disabled roles? Davis makes a strong argument that they should. The next chapter reconsiders our current way of looking at depression. Davis questions how psychiatry treats patients diagnosed with major depressive disorders. An important point in his discussion is that depression has to be seen as a communal activity or as a result of environmental circumstances that have become 'so normalized as to appear almost undetectable', as he puts it. The chapter is a welcomed critique of the 'diagnostic imperialism' of psychiatry, where more and more personality traits and emotional reactions are seen as pathological states. In psychiatry, the 'new normal' excludes the sorrows and pains of everyday life, and introduces a revised standard of life where people are happy all the time, even after the loss of jobs or the break-up of a marriage. Chapter 5 addresses our understanding of genes. Introducing the concept of prosthetic derived from the Greek word prostithemi, meaning something added or repl...