Foucault News

Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, Normality: A Critical Genealogy, University of Chicago Press, 2017

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

Contents

Part One. The Normal in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Thought

Chapter One
The “Normal State” in French Anatomical and Physiological Discourse of the 1820s and 1830s

Chapter Two
“Counting” in the French Medical Academy during the 1830s

Chapter Three
Rethinking Medical Statistics: Distribution, Deviation, and Type, 1840–1880

Chapter Four
Measuring Bodies and Identifying Racial Types: Physical Anthropology, c. 1860–1880

Chapter Five
The Dangerous Person as a Type: Criminal Anthropology, c. 1880–1900

Chapter Six
Anthropometrics and the Normal in Francis Galton’s Anthropological, Statistical, and Eugenic Research, c. 1870–1910

Part Two. The Dissemination of the Normal in Twentieth-Century Culture

Chapter Seven
Sex and the Normal Person: Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and Sexual Hygiene Literature, 1870–1930

Chapter Eight
The Object of Normality: Composite Statues of the Statistically Average American Man and Woman, 1890–1945

Chapter Nine
Sex and Statistics: The End of Normality

Kélina Gotman, Choreomania. Dance and Disorder, Oxford Studies in Dance Theory. Oxford University Press.

Description
When political protest is read as epidemic madness, religious ecstasy as nervous disease, and angular dance moves as dark and uncouth, the disorder being described is choreomania. At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, choreomania emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author Kélina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformations of bodies and body politics she shows how prejudices against expressivity unravel, in turn revealing widespread anxieties about demonstrative agitation. This history of the fitful body complements stories of nineteenth-century discipline and regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement imply constraints on political power and agency. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania works as an extension of discourses shaping colonialist orientalism, which alternately depict riotous bodies as dangerously infected others, and as curious bacchanalian remains. Through her research, Gotman also shows how beneath the radar of this colonial discourse, men and women gathered together to repossess on their terms the gestures of social revolt.

• Positions dance studies in the realm of scientific modernity
• Evolves definitions of dance to include dance-like gesture
• Looks at movement and mania histories through a critical theoretical lens
• Transforms language of movement disorders and disability studies

CONTENTS

Introduction: Choreomania, Another Orientalism
Part I: Excavating Dance in the Archives
1. Obscuritas Antiquitatis: Institutions, Affiliations, Marginalia
2. Madness after Foucault: Medieval Bacchanals
3. Translatio: St. Vitus’s Dance, Demonism and the Early Modern
4. The Convulsionaries: Antics on the French Revolutionary Stage
5. Mobiles, Mobs and Monads: Nineteenth-Century Crowd Forms
6. Médecine Rétrospective: Hysteria’s Archival Drag
Part II: Colonial and Postcolonial Stages: Scenes of Ferment in the Field
7. “Sicily Implies Asia and Africa”: Tarantellas and Comparative Method
8. Ecstasy-belonging in Madagascar and Brazil
9. Ghost Dancing: Excess, Waste and the American West
10. “The Gift of Seeing Resemblances”: Cargo Cults in the Antipodes
11. Monstrous Grace: Blackness and the New Dance “Crazes”
12. Coda: Moving Fields, Modernity and the Bacchic Chorus

Kélina Gotman is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at King’s College London. She is translator among others of Félix Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006) and collaborates widely on dance and theatre productions in Europe and North America.