Empire of Normality

phrenology not only ‘introduced the “average” to the masses, no matter how little factual basis it had. It provided, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, a new way for white middle-class men and women to position themselves in an imagined statistical collective’.

While conditions thus depended on context, what is clear is that throughout the capitalist world, the body itself, including the brain, increasingly came to be judged as being working or broken in relation to the individual’s real or perceived productivity. And everyone’s output was increasingly compared with everyone else’s due to them being in co

today, disability and disorder are understood in relation to concepts of statistical or medical normality. Yet in fact, there was no such conception in the ancient world. While the Pythagoreans had developed the concept of the arithmetic ‘mean’ shortly prior to the birth of Hippocrates, this concept was highly abstract. As Simon Raper has written,

the concept of health has been conflated with normality and productivity, and of how disablement and illness have actually increased, under the material relations of capitalism.

the key problem is not the pathology paradigm alone, but how capitalist logics and the pathology paradigm mutually reinforce each other, leaving no possibility of neurodivergent liberation without deep systemic change.

how and why capitalism is so intensely neuronormative, becoming more so with each passing decade. While all societies and economic systems have some standard of what is considered acceptable or valuable mental functioning – and while some mental illness and disability will always exist – I suggest capitalism is disposed to much tighter standards th

The basic point was that we should reject the very idea of a ‘normal’ brain and of the ‘neurotypical’ as an ideal. Instead, it implied viewing mental functioning more in the way we view biodiversity. In this view, it takes all kinds of minds for society to function, and thus normality should not be assumed to be superior to divergence. Rather, ther