Anti-Ableist Amherst: Rejecting Normalcy

I was in ninth grade when I was first openly contrasted to “normal people.”

It was a friend, and she didn’t mean to be cruel, but it’s something I doubt I’ll ever forget — even if only because it elucidated the way the world saw me, bringing the murkiness of confusing high school social dynamics into sharp focus. I had always felt different from other people, but in that moment I was painfully aware that other people saw me as different from them as well. No matter how hard I tried to fit in, I would never attain that elusive, exalted status of “normal.”

In 11th grade, I sat in class talking about disability (the only time I remember ever talking about disability in a high school academic setting), and listened to my classmates talk about disabled people versus “normal people.” I had already known which camp I fell into, known where I belonged in that binary. It was the same binary I’ve written about before that coldly categorizes people based on their conformity to a neurotypical standard, ruthlessly discarding those who fall outside of its narrow purview.

The idea that people are either “normal” or “abnormal” has been leveraged to systematically marginalize those with divergent minds and bodies. Those who are “abnormal” are excluded from “normal” society. “Abnormal” literally means “away from normal” — and being abnormal pushes one away from the dominant group, relegating them (us) to the margins. The enforced idea of normalcy, activist and author Jonathan Mooney writes, “banishes atypical bodies and minds. Variability becomes disability, abnormality and pathology.”

It is important, in understanding normalcy, to understand the precise origins of the concept. The idea that there is a “normal” seems timeless, but its beginnings are highly bound to the nineteenth century. The word “normal,” with its contemporary definition, has only been in use since around 1840, disability scholar Lennard Davis notes in his 1995 text “Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body.” Multiple factors contributed to the rise of the concept of normalcy, including Marxist ideas of the “average worker” and the nascent field of statistics (which was closely tied to eugenics, and thus the intense persecution of disabled people).

In “Empire of Normality,” autistic author Robert Chapman intertwines the regime of normalcy with industrial capitalist domination, noting that the rise in the idea of the “normal” allowed “white, cognitively abled, middle-class people to justify the various hierarchies that had emerged given the rise of capitalism as well as colonialism and imperialism.” “The normality concept,” Chapman observes, “mirrored contingent social hierarchies while at the same time framing these hierarchies as natural.”

What does it mean, really, to be normal? “Normalcy” as we know it is an oppressive construct that subjugates countless disabled/neurodivergent people. Disability studies professor Tanya Titchkosky’s comprehensive entry on the term “normal” in “Keywords for Disability Studies” essentially boils down to this: Normalcy is not reality; it is hegemony. For those who have been placed within the bounds of normalcy, perhaps it has been an unconscious fact. For me, it means constantly folding myself inwards, adapting to unspoken rules that suppress my individuality to assimilate into a neurotypical and abled standard. It is an abject, painful denial of who I truly am.

In a world where 15% of the population is disabled and many (if not most) people will become disabled by the end of their lifetimes (through losing one’s hearing with age, for example), normalcy as able-bodiedness is an illusion. In a world with endless diversity and variations of ways one can exist (and flourish!), normalcy is a farce. If we embrace the neurodiversity paradigm, we understand that no brains are truly “normal” or “abnormal,” just different, and that the cultural privileging of some minds over others does not reflect innate superiority but rather an ableist and unequal society. Saying no to normalcy opens the door to acceptance and love — of one’s self and also of others who live beyond the borders of so-called “normalcy.”

I’m rejecting normalcy. I hope you will join me.