Next to Normal? What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body Christian Martius Robinson A Thesis Submitted to The Faculty of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements For the Degree of a Masters of Arts Graduate Program in Communication & Culture York University Toronto, Ontario May 2012 © Christian Martius Robinson, 2012 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-90044-4 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-90044-4 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distrbute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. 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Canada ii Thesis Abstract Next to Normal - What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body Lennard Davis argues in Enforcing Normalcy (1995) that the idea of the normal body is not only understood as being typical or usual but also productive and useful. Conversely, the idea of the abnormal body is the acknowledged untypical, unusual and unproductive human form. In 2009 Cerrie Burnell, a children's television presenter with a partial limb was categorized as an inappropriate public figure and accused of frightening children. Using the Lennard Davis's perspectives on normal and abnormal subject categories and critical discourse analysis this thesis contends that the disabled body is discursively established in the media and common vernaculars as an abnormality, despite Burnell demonstrating the use of a productive disabled body and disability being a typical or usual condition, which most will inhabit, given a long enough life span. iii Acknowledgements Many thanks to Dr. Steve Bailey for his valuable support and guidance. Thanks also to Dr. Edward Slopek, Dr. Shannon Bell and Dr. Stuart J. Murray for their encouragement and assistance throughout this academic journey. Thanks to Chavisa Brett for putting me on this path in the first place. iv Next to Normal? What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body Cerrie Bumell and the Discursive Establishment of the Disabled Body By Christian Martius Robinson CONTENTS 1. Introduction 1 What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body 2. Literature Review 15 Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy 3. Methodology 39 Critical Discourse and Semiotic Analysis 4. Qualitative Content Analysis 55 The Cerrie Bumell Phenomenon 5. Conclusion 101 The Social Benefit of Deconstructing Subject Categories 6. Bibliography 113 1 1 Introduction What We Talk About When We Talk About the Body The body is often described in and represented with categories, delivered in parts, the focus of attention, constituted as specific areas over a bodily terrain. Much like the psychoanalytic notion that the idea of a whole body is an illusion1 (when the human form is made up of separate parts often encapsulating a plurality of limbs, organs, surfaces and features) the function of language also discursively conveys a selection of categories that amount to the illusion of a whole description. Terms like rational or irrational, able or disabled, and specifically, normal or abnormal are regularly applied to what is understood as both a subject and an object, conscious and unconscious, physical and mental and alive and dead to deliver a plurality of meaning embedded in the illusory whole of the body. The aim of this thesis is to interrogate the normal and abnormal body category and instances where these categories are established linguistically to represent the illusion of an all-encompassing description of the whole body form. The critical focus of this work, or the problem that needs to be addressed, is that what is considered to be normal or abnormal and is applied to the human body, is based on the modern idea (post- Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution) that human bodies are useful and able instruments. This idea is further authenticated by the fact that the word "normal" arrived 1 Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." Ecrits. New York: Norton (2002) p.76. 2 in the English language in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, a post Enlightenment period when the Industrial Revolution was reconfiguring the social and political landscape.2 Therefore, the attendant idea of normalcy became the desired human condition, which developed from a capitalist infrastructure that conceivably created new terms from which new social realities could be constructed in the interest of producing capital. The useful human was then the person who personified the average way of social life, and embodiment of average health and an average way of functioning under a system that required the average use of an able and working body. Connections that exist between the formation of words, historical periods and the coming into being of certain concepts can also be similarly reproduced when looking at the words "rational" and "irrational" that are associated with The Enlightenment period and the then newfound ability of human subjects to think for themselves beyond the influence of church and state. Immanuel Kant outlined the basis for rational thought as the burgeoning and unrealized potential of humans to think beyond imposed social structures when formulating his essay What is Enlightenment?3 But if words like "rational" and "irrational" are also used to designate the normal and abnormal then the standard that defines typical or usual averages also becomes commensurable with what is conceived as sensible or logical. Therefore, if the average measurement is the logical standard by which the whole human population is quantified it is important to question whether or not the rational individual self-determining human, who is capable of 2 Davis, Lennard. J. Enforcing Normalcy. Verso (1995) p.24. Kant, Immanuel. "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" Berlinische Monatsschrift (1784). 3 independent thought, which intellectually stretches beyond the traditionally imposed societal systems of control, is also the normal or average person that is defined by the imposed regulating systems that keep the infrastructure in place. Therefore, if the rational/normal or irrational/abnormal subject categories have collapsed into one another for ideological reasons the agent or the agency needs to be located, which systematically arranges the bodies that are required to be concurrently logical and average. In order to locate the sites of agency and the mechanisms of rhetoric apparent in discourse this thesis will utilize the Foucauldian notion that "power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations"4 or that agency is meaningless until it is deployed and is contingent upon historical and material factors, which condition individual agents (the general public) accordingly. This thesis will maintain that what we talk about when we talk about the body is either affiliated within the power relations initiated by social, commercial or medical systems and is, therefore, conceptualized as "normal" or is inversely understood as a body form that is of little use or purpose in a structural system of norms, and is consequently designated "abnormal." As a result, this thesis will submit that the agency of a network of social, commercial and medical systems defined, and continue to define, what bodies are constituted to be normal or abnormal When interrogating the modern construction of the human body, which is supplemented by consumer products, social practices and common discourses, it seems that the continuous maintenance required to deliver normalcy (conforming to a usual or 4 Foucault, Michel. T he History of Sexuality: An Introduction Vol. 1 (1978) Vintage (1990) p.94. 4 typical standard) is undermined by the very perpetuation that suggests that the act of presenting normalcy in the social world is abnormal, because it is performed and not realized as an autonomously determined state of being. In direct contrast to the maintenance required for the usual or typical body standard, common bodily differences that can sometimes be selected as abnormalities, in terms of the mortal, aging, damaged or disabled form, are in fact the usual or typical standards, or normal states, which await all human subjects, given a long enough life span. This thesis aims to talk about the body in order to conceive the normal body category as a social construction or more specifically, the opposite of a naturally occurring bodily state, a self-evident existential abnormality and not a condition that should necessarily be quantified as right or good.