“One reason why you won’t find many eloquent quotations about the desire to be normal in Shakespeare, or the Bible, or other common sources of moral wisdom, is that people didn’t sweat much over being normal until the spread of statistics in the nineteenth century.” ([Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal])
Since Michel Foucaults' championing of the work of the historian of science Georges Canguilhem, the concepts of norms, normal, normality, and normativity have been taken by many scholars to represent a distinctly modern, secular, and empirical technology for understanding variation in bodily form and human behavior. The resulting historical claim that there was, for instance, no “desire to be normal in Shakespeare,” as Michael Warner puts it, has provided a foundation for queer theorists, as well as disability theorists, in their attempts to deconstruct the coercive power of normality in the present day. At the same time, however, within literary studies, feminist and queer arguments premised on the existence of an alleged “heteronormativity” in the pre- and early modern past have become normative.
How might we “trouble” the teleological narrative about normality that has taken hold, while also prodding a historical notions of heteronormativity toward more nuance? Is it possible or desirable to reconcile these contrasting ideas about the historicity, meaning, and function of normality? If pre- and early modern cultures were not governed by norms, how might we understand the ideals and prescriptions of proper bodily conduct that circulated prior to modernity, particularly in relation to gendered and increasingly racialized bodies? Might there be a pre-history to the concept of the normal which would usefully inform our understandings of normality today? How might this investigation trouble the self-evidence of a modern/pre-modern divide, as well as the teleological imperative of much of the history of sexuality? And how do such historical questions affect our current theorization of the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class?
This interdisciplinary seminar will investigate such questions from the multiple standpoints of critical theory, the history of science, queer theory, gender studies, disability studies, and literary studies. The methods by which we analyze texts and historical claims—that is, the ways in which knowledge is produced—will be as much our focus as the readings of texts. More important than a literary background will be students’ willingness to venture broadly across disciplinary domains and literary/historical periods. Refamiliarization with Michel Foucaults' The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish prior to the first day of class is strongly recommended, as they will provide our point of departure.