DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN VIEWS
 

• First we have to look at the development of “the cult of normalcy,” in order to understand how disabled bodyminds came to be seen as abnormal

  • “Normalcy” of the 1800s births eugenics movements in the 1900s

    • It’s your civic responsibility to birth healthy, abled, white children so your nation doesn’t degenerate :/
      Sara Hendren in What Can a Body Do? 2020 speaks of "the cult of normalcy" in the Western world —
      
      Before the 1800s, we didn't talk about bodies in terms of "normal." All human bodies were "a shadow" of the perfection of deities or other hero figures. Then in the 1840s a French statistician named Adolphe Quetelet adapted the practice of scientific averaging to study human traits:
      
      "It took the whole of the nineteenth century for normalcy to shore up the pernicious force of a broad and encompassing mandate, a legacy that has been passed on to us: the average conjoined to the desirable, the most common range of height and weight and other qualities considered not only good but obligatory. Ideas like Charles Darwin’s “natural selection” were culturally (and mistakenly) interpreted as hereditary directives from nature—a normalcy that could be identified, and then perhaps overtly enhanced and encouraged, with average taking on the conceptual heft of better and best. Quetelet’s legacy was to make the average, what started as unremarkable by definition, into a paradoxical ideal. When the average is laden with cultural worth, everything changes: what was common began to be seen as what was “natural,” and what was “natural” came to be seen as right."

• Our modern view of disability has shifted from mostly being judgment to mostly being pity
   

  • Pre-industrialization: disabled people mostly stayed with their families. Post, they were institutionalized — no space for them in the machine

    • Coincided with ideas about normalcy and Victorian fear of degeneracy – now an individual who is intellectually disabled might mean something’s wrong with the whole bloodline

  • If not institutionalized, then put in freak shows – up till the 1930s, when the medical model was developed 

    • Eli Clare: “As pity, tragedy, and medical diagnosis/treatment entered the picture, the novelty and mystery of disability dissipated.” Voyeurism, curiosity, judgment no longer acceptable – but Clare argues the medical realm is the new “freak show”
      Eli Clare: Today's freakdom happens in hospitals and doctors' offices. It happens during telethons as people fork over money out of pity, the tragic stories milked until they're dry. It happens in nursing homes where severely disabled people are often forced to live against their wills. It happens on street corners and at bus stops, on playgrounds and in restaurants. It happens when nondisabled people stare, trying to be covert, smacking their children to teach them how to pretend not to stare.
       

• Judgment remains — of all who can’t be fully productive members of society; Protestant work ethic
   

  • Society says everyone’s goal should be assimilation into wealth…

  • The dissonance so many of us experience: I am doing my best, I am praying so hard, so why…?