Sage Academic Books
Disability Studies: A Student's Guide
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Author: Colin Cameron
Pub. Date: 2016
Product: Sage Academic Books
DOI: [Link]
Disciplines: Disability & Rehabilitation (general), Disability & Rehabilitation, Sociology of Health & Illness,
Sage Sage Academic Books
© Colin Cameron 2014
Sociology of Health, Illness & the Body, Health & Social Care
Access Date: January 28, 2026
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Online ISBN: 9781473957701
© 2016 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
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Normalcy
ColinCameron
Normalcy is a term used to describe ways in which people think about themselves in relation to others around
them. It is assumed until it is disrupted and is, as Titchkosky puts it, an ‘unmarked viewpoint’ (Titchkosky
2003: 148). Far from being a natural quality or characteristic, however, normalcy is dependent on measuring
itself against those it has excluded. Normalcy needs abnormalcy in order to recognise itself.
Davis has pointed out that ‘just as conceptualisations of race, class and gender shape the lives of those who
are not black, poor or female, so the concept of disability regulates the bodies of those who are “normal”’
(Davis 1995: 12). Our sense of who we are as individuals is tied up to a large extent in measuring and eval-
uating ourselves against others we have decided we are unlike, or wouldn't want to be like (Stryker 2002). In
this sense, in Davis’ words, ‘disability is not a minor issue that relates to a relatively small number of unfor-
tunate people; it is part of a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking about the body under
certain historical circumstances’ (Davis 1995: 2).
The appearance of normality as a principle underpinning social organisation coincided with the struggle of
emerging modern societies during the nineteenth century to find ways of controlling the rapidly growing
amounts of information, products, processes, and human movement that accompanied industrialisation (Gar-
land-Thomson 2009). The word ‘normal’, as used to mean ‘conforming to, not deviating or differing from, the
common type, standard, regular, usual’, only enters the English language around 1840 (Davis 1995: 24). Pre-
viously the body had been represented in terms of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘grotesque’. As Davis has pointed out,
by definition nobody could have the perfect body. Pre-industrialisation, there was no expectation that popu-
lations would have bodies that conformed to the ideal (1995: 25). In contrast, however, as McDonnell (2007:
154) suggests, a considerable part of the potency of normality as an instrument for interpreting conditions
and behaviours came from its capacity to represent both what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’. A mythical ‘average
man’ became the model for ‘normal’ physical and intellectual constitution.
Normality carries social advantage which is why, in order to achieve validation from those with whom we come
into contact, we learn to ‘abide by the rules’, ‘play the game’ and ‘look the part’. Normality is an exacting re-
quirement, working at an unconscious level to shape our decisions about how we appear to other people –
in terms of the clothes we wear, the postures we adopt, the language we use, the gadgets we are seen with,
and so on – and binding us to structures of commodity capitalism. ‘Getting it right’ is important. Standing out
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and experiencing disapproval for ‘getting it wrong’ can be sensed as a demeaning experience which leads to
ostracism.
It can be argued that the problem of disability is not caused by the aberrant bodies of individual disabled peo-
ple, but that the real problem relates to the way normalcy requires impairment to be identified as abnormality.
Disabled people are required to internalise the values of the society which has marked their bodies as abnor-
mal and to do their best to cover impairment up. ‘Getting as close as possible to “normal” standards of bodily
engagement … is a cultural expectation of disabled persons and assures that normalcy maintains its status
as a dominant but taken-for-granted phenomenon’ (Titchkosky 2003: 76).
From an early age disabled people undergo training to experience their bodies as challenges to be struggled
with in the pursuit of normality. This is expressed in two statements below by Charles and Mary, two disabled
people I interviewed in Cameron (2010), recounting their experiences at segregated ‘special’ schools:
Charles: I didn't use a wheelchair in school, I used, like, a walking frame … and you're under pres-
sure to not end up in a wheelchair, to keep walking … (p. 86)
Mary: I went there from when I was six to … nearly fourteen … and I left … without, I think, the
words disability, handicap … certainly not impairment … ever being mentioned … all the time we
were extolled to act like other children … to be like other children … it was a culture that really de-
nied children any sense of themselves as being disabled … (p.82)
Charles, an adult wheelchair user now and happy being so, describes the pressure he experienced at school
to maintain a posture as close as possible to ‘normal’ standards of bodily engagement. To use a wheelchair
was seen as a mark of having failed in the emulation of normalcy. Mary's account tells of how, throughout her
school career, ‘other children’ (‘normal’ children) were held up as exemplars of physicality and behaviour. As
she says, no opportunity was given for the possibility of learning to value herself as a disabled child.
As noted in Swain et al. (2003: 83), many disabled people are well into adulthood before they manage to
abandon, or at least challenge, expectations of normality. For most this is a gradual process which comes with
the confidence of age, but for some it can be a sudden realisation. A deaf woman cited in Campling (1981) is
quoted recounting such an experience:
They were laughing and talking and didn't give a damn that the whole place knew they were deaf …
My years of pretence seemed suddenly absurd. I had been making life ‘normal’ and easy for every-
one except myself.
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(Swain et al. 2003: 83)
Morris believes the assumption that disabled people want to be ‘normal’, rather than just as they are, is one
of the most oppressive experiences they are subjected to. She states that ‘I do not want to have to try and
emulate what a non-disabled woman looks like in order to assert positive things about myself. I want to be
able to celebrate my difference, not hide from it’ (Morris 1991: 184).
Human experience is characterised by variety, of which impairment is part. While the pursuit of normality in-
volves a requirement to hide away and deny, rather than to acknowledge and include impairment on its own
terms, this results in a significant distortion of our understanding of what being human is about.
For Discussion
• Are you normal? How do you know? How does the degree of normality you claim (or, conversely,
you can't claim) impact on your life?
• Who do you know who is considered ‘abnormal’? How does your view of their abnormality impact
on their life?
• What's so good about being normal?
Further Reading
Corbett, J. (1991) ‘So, who wants to be normal?’, Disability & Society, 6 (3): 259–60.
Davis, L. (2010) ‘Constructing normalcy’, in [Link] (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader. London: Routledge,
pp. 9–28.
Wheeler, M. (2011) ‘Syndrome or difference: a critical review of medical conceptualisations of Asperger's syn-
drome’, Disability & Society, 26 (7): 839–51.
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References
Cameron, C. (2010) ‘Does anybody like being disabled? A critical exploration of impairment, identity, media
and everyday experience in a disabling society’. PhD thesis, [Link] ac-
cessed 31 October 2012.
Campling, J. (ed.) (1981) Images of Ourselves: Women with Disabilities Talking. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Davis, L.J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body. London: Verso.
Garland-Thomson, R. (2009) Staring: The Way We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McDonnell, P. (2007) Disability & Society: Ideological and Historical Dimensions. Dublin: Blackhall.
Morris, J. (1991) Pride Against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability. London: The Women's Press.
Stryker, S. (2002) Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version. Caldwell, NJ: The Blackburn Press.
Swain, J., French, S. and Cameron, C. (2003) Controversial Issues in a Disabling Society. Maidenhead: Open
University Press.
Titchkosky, T. (2003) Disability, Self and Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
[Link]
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