Power and Everyday Practices PDF

Power and Everyday Practices SECOND EDITION Deborah Brock, Aryn Martin, Rebecca Raby, and Mark P. Thomas UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS © University of Toronto Press 2019 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada All rights reserved. The use of an...

Power and Everyday Practices SECOND EDITION Deborah Brock, Aryn Martin, Rebecca Raby, and Mark P. Thomas UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS © University of Toronto Press 2019 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying, a licence from Access Copyright (the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 320–56 Wellesley Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2S3—is an infringement of the copyright law. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Power and everyday practices / Deborah Brock, Rebecca Raby, Mark P. Thomas, Aryn Martin. Names: Brock, Deborah R. (Deborah Rose), 1956– editor. | Raby, Rebecca, 1968– editor. | Thomas, Mark P. (Mark Preston), 1969– editor. | Martin, Aryn E., 1973– editor. Description: Second edition. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20190099119 | ISBN 9781487588236 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487588229 (softcover) Subjects: LCSH: Equality. | LCSH: Power (Social sciences) Classification: LCC HN49.P6 P69 2019 | DDC 303.3—dc23 We welcome comments and suggestions regarding any aspect of our publications—please feel free to contact us at [email protected] or visit our internet site at utorontopress.com. North America UK, Ireland, and continental Europe 5201 Dufferin Street NBN International North York, Ontario, Canada, M3H 5T8 Estover Road, Plymouth, PL6 7PY, UK ORDERS PHONE: 44 (0) 1752 202301 2250 Military Road ORDERS FAX: 44 (0) 1752 202333 Tonawanda, New York, USA, 14150 ORDERS E-MAIL: [email protected] ORDERS PHONE: 1–800–565–9523 ORDERS FAX:1–800–221–9985 ORDERS E-MAIL: [email protected] Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an error or omission, please notify the publisher. This book is printed on acid-free paper. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL CONSEIL DES ARTS DE L'ONTARIO Canada Council Conseil des Arts an Ontario government agency for the Arts du Canada un organisme du gouvernement de I'Ontario MIX Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Canada FSC www.fsc.org Paper from responsible sources FSC ® C 016245 Contents List of Figures ix List of Text Boxes xi Preface xiii Acknowledgements xv Introduction: Unpacking the Centre 3 DEBORAH BROCK, ARYN MARTIN, REBECCA RABY, AND MARK P. THOMAS Part One: Foundations 17 DEBORAH BROCK, ARYN MARTIN, REBECCA RABY, AND MARK P. THOMAS 1 Thinking About Power 19 DEBORAH BROCK 2 Assembling Our Tool Kit: Interrogating Representations and Discourses 53 ANDREA M. NOACK AND ARYN MARTIN Part Two: The Centre, Normalization, and Power 75 DEBORAH BROCK, ARYN MARTIN, REBECCA RABY, AND MARK P. THOMAS 3 Fashioning the Normal Body 79 ANNE MCGUIRE AND KELLY FRITSCH vii CONTENTS 4 Trans/gender 101 DAN IRVING 5 Thinking “Straight” 125 ALIX HOLTBY 6 Whiteness Invented 147 MELANIE KNIGHT 7 Being “Middle Class”? 171 MARK P. THOMAS 8 Growing Up, Growing Old 193 REBECCA RABY 9 Citizenship and Borders 217 NANDITA SHARMA Part Three: Everyday Practices 239 DEBORAH BROCK, ARYN MARTIN, REBECCA RABY, AND MARK P. THOMAS 10 Science and the “Matter” of Power 241 ARYN MARTIN 11 Are You “Normal”? 259 HEIDI RIMKE AND DEBORAH BROCK 12 Going Shopping: The Politics of Everyday Consumption 275 DENNIS SORON 13 Are You Financially Fit? 291 MARY-BETH RADDON 14 Let’s Get a Coffee 309 GAVIN FRIDELL AND ERIKA KOSS 15 Indigenous Youth: Representing Themselves 327 MARGOT FRANCIS 16 Being a Tourist 345 GADA MAHROUSE Conclusion 365 DEBORAH BROCK, ARYN MARTIN, REBECCA RABY, AND MARK P. THOMAS Glossary 369 Contributors 401 Index 405 viii Figures 1.1a Karl Marx 20 1.1b Antonio Gramsci 21 1.1c Michel Foucault 21 1.1d Stuart Hall 22 1.1e Leanne Simpson 22 1.2 The Panopticon 26 2.1 March for Science 56 2.2 The “clapping hands” emoji 64 2.3 Angela James, elite hockey player 69 3.1 Collection of advertisements focused on normal dress 80 3.2 Demonstrator attending a rally on the one-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory disaster, 2014 95 4.1 Normalizing gender through party decor 105 5.1 Vigil for the victims of a serial killer, 2018 130 5.2 Nursery poster 134 6.1 Racism exposed on Facebook following Colten Boushie’s death 148 6.2 A racial hygienist measures the forehead of a young man with calipers, 1937 154 6.3 The work of James C. Prichard depicting skulls from different races, 1826 155 7.1 James E. Cayne and Alan D. Schwartz appear before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 2010 179 7.2 Sample pay stub 181 7.3 Chinese factory workers assembling components of LCD display boards 182 ix FIGURES 7.4 Fight for $15 and Fairness demonstration 185 8.1 Dégrés des Ages, a woodcut from early 19th-century France, provides a historical representation of growing up and growing old 194 8.2 Madonna and Child, Duccio di Buoninsegna, ca. 1284–1286 201 8.3 The Raging Grannies, who first emerged in Victoria, BC, in the 1980s 210 9.1 Bergamini ship on the Mediterranean Sea carrying people moving from Africa and trying to land in Italy, June 2014 218 9.2 Families in Tong Ping displaced persons settlement carry their newly received non-food items back to where they are staying 221 9.3 An asylum claimant and her two-month-old baby are taken in custody by RCMP officers in Hemmingford, Quebec, 2017 224 10.1 “Schroeder Stairs,” an illustration of interpretive flexibility 244 10.2 Romance between egg and sperm, a common motif 250 10.3 Biochemical recognition between egg and sperm protein folds 251 11.1 The “tranquilizing chair” was invented in 1811 to immobilize the patient 265 11.2 Empowermints! by Carly Stasko 268 12.1 Notions of freedom, personal identity, and agency are all closely entwined with shopping and consuming 277 12.2 Food desert that contains a dense cluster of fast-food establishments 284 12.3 Image from the magazine Adbusters 286 13.1 Financial fitness represented as an athletic, middle-aged, white businessman 295 13.2 The solidarity economy 302 14.1 A branch of coffee cherries from a coffee plantation in Hawai‘i 313 14.2 Cheerful, coffee-drinking American soldier on a World War II poster 316 14.3 President of the Starbucks Coffee Chile Trade Union, Andrés Giordano Salazar, leading a protest for workers’ rights 319 15.1a, b Retaliation against Garden River First Nation protest of HST 339, 340 16.1 Graffiti in Barcelona, Spain 346 16.2 Migrants in dinghy about to land in Spain, 2018 355 x 3 Fashioning the Normal Body ANNE MCGUIRE and KELLY FRITSCH “Dress Normal,” commands a Gap clothing advertisement. Featuring actress Elizabeth Moss, the advertisement (Figure 3.1) depicts a young, tall, slender, able-bodied, white woman strolling along a sunny, sandy beach, with seagulls and a pier visible in the back- ground. The image captures Moss mid-step. She is glancing casually over her shoulder and smiling, her right hand raised slightly, as if she’s in conversation with someone out- side of the frame. Echoing the lightness of her physical stance and windblown hair, the clothing she wears is also casual: a white button-up shirt and black fitted slacks, a light grey wool topcoat, and black ballet flats. “Dress like no one’s watching,” reads the pale pink text situated to the right of the frame. The Gap logo appears on the left, also in pale pink and, beneath it, “Dress Normal.” So pale is the text that the logo and its attendant directives almost disappear into the background of the peaceful seaside scene. This image is, at once, an instruction, an invocation, and a command. In one sense, the Gap ad is pedagogical—it teaches the viewer about what normal is: how it looks, how it moves, which bodies can and do embody its definitional confines (and, by exten- sion, which do not). The image suggests that looking and dressing like Moss is “normal” and that this normal is at once both desirable and mundane: normal is business casual, a dab of lip gloss, coolly strolling along a sunny beach. In addition to the normal stan- dards of dress and beauty presented in the ad, the ad also presents us with other markers of normativity. As normal is localized in the body of Moss—an actress famous for her portrayal of the “girl next door” Peggy Olsen on AMC’s Mad Men and June Osborne on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale—the category of normal implicitly confirms its associa- tion with privilege. At the same time as it shows the viewer what is normal, the ad also instructs its viewer to be normal. Part of unpacking this latter demand is to question how normal became normal in the first place, a query that takes us to the heart of the everyday practices of power. 79  POWER AND E V ERYDAY PRAC TIC ES FIGURE 3.1 Co llection Credit: A of adve nne Mc rtiseme Guire an nts focu d Kelly F sed on n ritsch ormal d ress. In this c is contex hapter, we exam tually sp ine the id of peop ec e le. We e ific and produce a of normal as normal x amine th s a som in the co e historic range of materia ething that, at and con n tempora al under l effects the sam tinues t ry West pinning on the b e time, scapes. L o chang and trace s of the e o dies and oo e a lon th e ways in m e rg minds neoliber king to recent, 2 gside changing which th ence of the cate is catego g alis people in m, we challeng 1st-cent ury social, e co ry has ch ory the categ e the com shifts in the co nomic, and geo anged ferences o m ncept of political , like dis ry of normal. I on assumption normal lan push for abil nste that u nder glob d- different ity, offer an im ad, we reveal ho we need only to alized forms of po w non-n include embodie rtant critique o or m d relatio f the vio mative embodie ore ns unde lence of d dif- r contem The No rmal as porary c the normal and Natura o nditions l of powe r. The wo rd “norm or medic al” circu al lates per is also ro state of a body vasively. It is ofte utinely ( deployed e.g., “normal b nu as a way lood pre sed to refer to of categ ssure,” “ a statistic orizing, no al and/ 80 evaluatin rmal developm g, or jud ent”). It ging peo ple (e.g.,  FASHIONING THE NORMAL BODY “normal person”). The present-day prevalence of “the normal”—or this idea of a normal typology—might lure us into imagining that this concept is universal and transhistori- cal: “after all,” writes Lennard Davis (1995), “people seem to have an inherent desire to compare themselves to others” (p. 1). “Inherent” here implies natural and inevitable: that this desire to compare ourselves to others is somehow built into people rather than being a result of the ways we have been socialized. Often, in comparing ourselves to others, we find ourselves deficient or lacking and seek to remedy this perceived lack through consumption. Thus, consumer advertisements like the Gap’s Dress Normal ad are often rich sites through which we might analyze the normal body and the everyday conditions of its production. As is evident in the Gap ad specifically, but also more broadly across Western culture, the normal is often conflated with the natural. What is normal seems straightforwardly evident; the normal is the status quo, the usual, just the way things are. “Normal” is not fat bodies or wrinkled skin. “Normal” is not wheelchair users or someone hand flapping. Ideas about normal and not normal types are, for many, simply a matter of common sense. Yet, determinations of who or what is “obviously normal” rely on an intricate network of values, beliefs, interpretations, assumptions, and power relations. According to Rod Michalko (2002), the persistent contemporary cultural association between the normal and the natural involves a process of camouflage. “Normalcy blends into what is conceived of as ‘naturally given,’” he writes, “and the only way to sustain this cam- ouflage is to avoid any attention” (p. 82). Taken to be natural (and thus neutral), the normal appears only to disappear into the background order of everyday life. The sense of normal as conceptually universal and politically neutral is key to the logic of the Gap ad. The ad presents Moss’s body (i.e., her physique and her stance, as well as her clothes and accessories) as simultaneously classic and neutral. Her look, in other words, is not meant to betray any particular or specific presentation of self (i.e., we are told she dresses “like no one’s watching”). Classed as normal, her bodily appearance is framed as typical, timeless, and universal—just the way things are and, indeed, have always been. The category normal blends bodily description and bodily evaluation: norms thus have the power to “bridge the fact/value distinction,” as Ian Hacking (1990) argues, “whispering in your ear that what is normal is also all right” (p. 160). Describing a normal body as one that is, for example, youthful, thin, white, or able-bodied is not only a description of a body but also a judgement or evaluation of those characteristics as positive, good, ideal, and acceptable: the best or even the only possible way to (properly) be. The normal body thus also becomes understood as a body we should all want to have and strive to attain. Endowed with cultural value and social privilege, the category of normal is therefore infused with considerable power, the effects of which, as we shall see, are not evenly distributed across groups of people or populations. The ways in which the normal camouflages as natural conceals its own foundation as a historically particular, ideologically mediated, political, and cultural phenomenon. If, following the methodology of Michel Foucault, we examine the historical genealogy of 81 POWER AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES the concept of the normal—that is, if we trace the development of the concept through culture and history—we discover that the normal presents itself as a given truth or fact when it is actually a specific cultural value judgement. As Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens (2017) argue, the normal “is in no sense historically ubiquitous, and does not deserve to be considered a timeless idea” (p. 3). Neither should it be considered a universal idea. Indeed, notes Davis (1995), “the idea of a norm is less a condition of human nature than it is a feature of a certain kind of society” (p. 24). This idea of normal as a condition of a given society goes beyond a mere recognition that normal varies in different societies, locales, or historical eras (although surely it does). What Davis seems to be suggesting here is that the very idea that there is a normal is specific to a particular society and time. In the Gap ad, Moss’s embodied “look” is, of course, most certainly highly curated. The idea of “normal dress” is made sensible, for example, by way of a calculated adver- tising strategy, one that is reliant upon classed, raced, and gendered trends in fashion, as well as culturally and historically specific norms of bodily desirability, ability, and beauty. Further, as we shall explore later in the chapter, the capacity to “dress normal” in the Global North is only made possible by camouflaging and naturalizing unjust social relations of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and ability in the Global South—for example, by way of the debilitation of garment industry workers labouring in hazardous factory conditions. The normal is fashioned literally in the Gap clothing ad in the sense that this is an ad for a particular normative style of fashion. The normal is also fashioned figuratively in the ad insofar as it relies on a culturally particular idea of what normal is, an idea that is made or put together (i.e., fashioned) through a network of cultural values and inequitable social relations. Because normalcy’s cultural power rests in part on its invisibility, or its capacity to blend into the background order of the everyday, Michalko (2009) contends that perhaps the most abnormal thing we might do is “atten[d] to its production” (p. 91). Put differ- ently, we must denaturalize normal, or treat it as a contingent site of meaning-making constituted in and through power relations. This kind of cultural inquiry requires us to historicize cultural understandings of the normal, to observe its shifts and adaptations across time and through space, to attend to the particular socio-political conditions that render it intelligible at a given time. It also requires us to observe and analyze normalcy’s very real, material effects. While the social relations of normalcy impact all of our bodies, they do so in different ways and with differing outcomes. A key theme of this chapter is that the normative measures of the good, right, normal, healthy, and able human body/mind have provided the grounds for so much social injustice, such as with the medicalization of disabled, queer, and trans bodies; the rise of eugenic science and scientific racism; the sense of presumed “goodness” or “rightness” of colonial and imperial interventions and occupations; the regulation of women’s bodies by the state; the institutionalization of disabled and mad people; the proliferation of the weight- loss and beauty industry, and so on. The move to historicize (and thus denaturalize) normalcy can enable us to better understand how social categories (i.e., race, class, 82  FASHIONING THE NORMAL BODY gender, ability, etc.) and systems of oppression (i.e., racism, classism, sexism, ableism) intermingle and interact to produce the everyday understandings that some bodies are better, fitter, or more desirable than others. It is important to note that in drawing out the power relations that support and sustain normalcy, we are not arguing to broaden what or who is included within the bounds of normal. We are not claiming, in other words, that disabled people, for example, or trans people, or fat people, are normal too. Rather, we want to expose the damaging logic of a system that includes some while leaving others perpetually excluded. To borrow from disability justice activist Mia Mingus (2011), “we don’t want to simply join the ranks of the privileged; we want to dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them.” The ways in which some bodies bump up against the rules, expectations, and common sense of what is considered normal allows us to notice the exclusionary ways in which our society is organized. It also invites us to think about and critique how those exclusions become common sense, enabling us to imagine and engage with normalcy differently. Historicizing Normal Despite its common usage, and thus its clear significance to the contemporary order of things, the normal is a relatively recent invention. As has been described by Davis (1995), Cryle and Stephens (2017), and a great many other cultural historians (e.g., Hacking, 1990; Warman, 2010), the word “normal”—in its current usage denoting “usual,” “typical,” or “common”—does not make a formal appearance until as late as 1848. The meaning of the word continued to remain obscure for some time. Prior to the late 19th century, the normal circulated in the realm of geometry, meaning “per- pendicular,” “right-angled,” or “orthogonal” (Hacking, 1990). It was derived from the Latin word norma—for a measurement device or T-square used in carpentry, masonry, and drafting to reproduce right angles—and, throughout the 18th century, it became commonplace to use normal in reference to something that was standard, “right by rule, made by the square or Rule” (as defined by Blounts’s 1656 Glossographia). While normal is no longer commonly associated with geometry, the idea of the norm as a tool of right measurement has endured. By the mid to late 19th century, the normal had become an important concept underpinning a new style of measurement: statistics (Cryle & Stephens, 2017; Davis, 1995; Hacking, 1990). At this time, Western Europe saw the introduction of the “normal curve” or “normal distribution”—which describes a law of mathematics positing that the further a given variance is from the mean, the less frequently it will occur in nature (Stephens, 2014). The notion of normal was utilized to mark out a limited numerical range: the middle of the bell curve. The normal, in other words, became synonymous with average. The statistical norm was not the only conception of normal in circulation in the 19th century, however. While statistics gave us normal by the numbers, 19th-century 83 POWER AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES medicine introduced the somewhat different understanding of normal as a dynamic biological state (Canguilhem, 1991; Cryle & Stephens, 2017; Hacking, 1990). An organ or bodily system could be deemed medically “normal” only in the absence of “pathology”—the one state anticipated and required the other. The work of Georges Canguilhem (1991) shows how the biomedical normal at once names the body’s “habitual state” and its “ideal” (p. 152). The normal state, he writes, is “that which is such that it ought to be” (p. 125). While the statistical norm gives rise to the possibility of an outlier (or that which is outside of the normal range), the medical norm similarly gives birth to a pathologized category of the abnormal (Canguilhem, 1991; Foucault, 2003). Indeed, according to Cryle and Stephens (2017), it was only through this intermingling of statistical and medical understandings of normal that “that the word came to acquire its current cul- tural authority, moving from its specialist use in scientific discourses ‘into the sphere of—almost—everything’” (p. 4). In this way, the statistical and medical roots of the concept of the normal provide an effective means of classifying and ordering all modes of human and non-human variation: as Hacking notes, “people, behaviour, states of affairs, diplomatic relations, molecules: all these may be normal or abnormal” (1990, p. 160). Yet, as you learned in Chapter 1, any act of categorization is also a mode of governance. Through normalcy as a mode of governance, normal has become “indis- pensable” because it has created scientific and medical ways of being “objective” about bodies (Hacking, 1990, p. 160). Statistical/biomedical notions of normal were soon recognized to be an efficient means of measuring, monitoring, and modifying the bodily shapes and comportments of individuals and whole populations in accordance with particular white, Western European idealizations of the human. A great many early statisticians in 19th-century Europe were also eugenicists (Davis, 1995). This association between statistics and eugenics ought not surprise us. As Davis (1995) cautions, “the next step in conceiving of the population as norm and non-norm is for the state to attempt to norm the nonstandard—the aim of eugenics” (p. 30). Perhaps the most prominent of the 19th-century eugenicists was Francis Galton, whose foundational work on the development of the statistical sciences cannot be separated from his expansive writing on the superiority of normal or “pure” heredities and, relat- edly, on the need for the eugenic elimination of abnormal outliers, so-called “degener- ates.” Widely adopted in 19th- and 20th-century North America and Europe, eugenics implemented social engineering by incentivizing the reproduction of “fit” families and decreasing or prohibiting reproduction of those deemed abnormal or “unfit.” In prac- tice, this included a variety of state-sponsored measures as drastic as forced sterilization, removal of children from their families, and genocide. Eugenic normalcy was raced white and its oppositional category—i.e., abnormal degeneracy—grouped together a wide swath of bodies that did not conform to the heavily policed white Western European colonial ideals of bourgeois respectability (e.g., the poor and/or non-white body, the queer, trans, or otherwise “sexually deviant” body, the “cripple,” “insane,” or “feebleminded,” the “alcoholic,” the Semitic, and so on). 84  FASHIONING THE NORMAL BODY This distinctively eugenic desire to know, count, classify, order, and control the reproduction of human characteristics in terms of normal or abnormal traits had everything to do with the ideologies and practicalities of both colonial and capital- ist rule. Characterized as a uniquely “fit” body (i.e., as physically and intellectually strong, virile, and white), the eugenic normal was also, and not coincidentally, con- sidered fit for the idealized work of empire-building. Colonial and imperial politics, alongside the rise of capitalist industrialization in continental Europe and North America, also played a role in the development of eugenic logics of standardization. For example, as the art of war became more and more reliant on mass-produced machines, the idea of a normal soldier body—a body that might easily interface with standard-issue technologies of war—became increasingly important to the overall efficiency of colonial military operatives, which included territorial acquisition and military expansion (Hacking, 1990). Equally important to the efficiency of empire was the body of the citizen-worker at home. As you will learn in Chapter 7, and as Karl Marx’s work so clearly shows, the rise of industrialization both required and produced a highly valued homogenized, efficient, able-bodied, citizen-labourer. As the human body began to interface with technologies of production, or, indeed, as the body became an essential part of the machinery of production, there emerged new— and equally mechanical—means of governing and conditioning the body through disciplinary power. The Power of Normalization In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1979) describes the disciplinary process of normalization as “one of the great instruments of power” (p. 184). Whereas some forms of power are overt, mandating that bodies comply with an explicit rule or law—e.g., we might make the conscious decision to show up at work at the required time because we know that this is a formal rule and that not complying will result in an undesirable consequence, such as being fired—the disciplinary technique of normalization that took hold in the 19th century operates more covertly. As we have discussed, the rules of normalcy are often unwritten, concealed as implicit, or natural- ized. Yet, while the rules of normalcy do seem to “emanat[e] from everywhere and nowhere,” they are nonetheless “compulsory” (McRuer, 2006, p. 8). Just because a given norm is not formally written into state law does not mean that it is any less mandatory. As bodies and minds move outside of the naturalized limits of social norms, these transgressions are nonetheless keenly, and sometimes violently, felt at the level of the body. For example, as a body moves outside of the (raced, classed, gen- dered) norms of dress—such as when a masculine-appearing person wears pink cloth- ing or a dress in contexts rigidly defined by norms of gender and (hetero)sexuality, or when a Black youth appears wearing a hoodie in spaces ruled by the politics of white respectability—this transgression will be met with a variety of social punishments, 85 POWER AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES which might range from microaggressions (e.g., a disgusted or nervous side glance from a stranger passing by) to more overt forms of structural or physical violence (e.g., being made a target for “random” carding by police, physical assault, etc.). Yet, “in discipline,” writes Foucault, “punishment is only one element of a double sys- tem: gratification-punishment” (1979, p. 180). This means that as a body conforms to social norms of, for example, dress—a white-presenting woman wearing a white button-up shirt and black fitted slacks for example, as is featured in the Dress Normal ad—such compliance is met with a variety of associated rewards: a complimentary look or comment from a friend or stranger, a successful job interview, the ability to pass through airport security without hassle, or seeing one’s body positively reflected in the popular media. Foucault’s work thus shows us that normalization does not simply work by extol- ling individuals to “be more normal” (as the Gap ad suggests). Indeed, the suggestion that normal is merely an autonomous choice asks us to look away from the power- ful disciplinary structures through which power comes to shape bodies; disciplinary power encourages or incentivizes particular ways of being, while discouraging or forbidding others. To take another example, let us think for a moment about the disciplinary function of public transportation. We can learn much about the shape of the imagined or assumed “normal rider of public transportation” from the design and placement of bus and subway seats. By examining the height, width, and depth of the standard bus seat, as well as its placement in proximity to other seats, we can come to better understand how the seat itself anticipates a particular kind of body (e.g., a body that will not spill over into the next seat, a body that will be able to stand up and sit down at a particular seat height without any difficulty, and so on). What is more, the standard bus seat not only anticipates the normal body, it also works to ensure it. For example, people who do not easily or comfortably fit into public seating frequently receive hostile comments or stares from others for “taking up too much space.” Roxane Gay (2018) notes that she has felt pressure from society to lose weight in order to “fit more peacefully into a world that is not at all interested in accom- modating a body like [hers].” She comments, “As a fat person, I am supposed to want to lose weight. I am supposed to be working on the problem of my body. I am supposed to apply discipline to physical unruliness.” As Gay’s statement makes clear, the body is not only disciplined by external rules, structures, and relations (i.e., the seats that don’t quite fit, or an aggravated glance by a fellow bus rider), normalization also affects our personal feelings about our bodies, compelling us to discipline and govern ourselves toward social norms. Similarly, someone who has difficulty balancing or getting in or out of their seat may be subject to pitying looks from other riders, may be chastised for “holding up” the bus, or may become the recipient of unsolicited suggestions from strangers about how to fix or cure their unruly or non-normative bodies so that they would better fit in normative spaces. As disability activist Harriet McBryde Johnson notes, such people “think they know everything there is to know just by looking at me” (2005, p. 2). Eli Clare (2003) 86  FASHIONING THE NORMAL BODY similarly speaks to the violence of having his dynamic, disabled, and gender noncon- forming body dissected, reduced, and disciplined by the stares of strangers: when first a pair of eyes caught me, held me in their vise grip, tore skin from muscle, muscle from bone. Those eyes always shouted, “Freak, retard, cripple,” demanding an answer for tremoring hands, a tomboy’s bold and unsteady gait I never grew out of. It started young, anywhere I encountered humans. Gawking, gaping, staring seeped into my bones, became the marrow. (p. 257) Uncomfortable and even physically and/or emotionally harmful, such squeezes, sighs, and stares work to make riding public transportation difficult or even dangerous for people whose bodies deviate from the norm. Meanwhile, those who do the staring fail to recognize that the ease they experience in this built environment is not “natural” but tailor-made for them. The disciplinary norm serves not only as an ideal toward which the individual must always strive but against which they will inevitably fail. Just because a body might read- ily approximate a particular set of socio-cultural rules or norms at one time or in a particular space does not mean that this body will always pass as normal. To inhabit the normal is always tenuous, ever dependent upon a constellation of relations between bodies and their discursive and material contexts. Because of this, the normal-passing body is always susceptible to betraying the signs of abnormalcy, and thus is always under threat of being expelled from the normal. To better understand this, we might imagine a scenario wherein an apparently normal child is at play in the school playground. In this particular moment and space, this child passes easily into the category of normal; that is to say, the child plays in conformity with received norms of gender, age, development, and so on. Yet, as we have discussed, the body’s claim to normal is precarious. As the recess bell rings, we might imagine this same child, now in the classroom, noticeably shifting in their desk. Perhaps they are bored, or excited, or having difficulty under- standing or paying attention to the teacher’s lesson. Perhaps the movements of their body are expressive or communicative movements. Or perhaps there is no single or specific cause for this non-normative classroom behaviour: maybe this is simply how this student “does” being a student. Nevertheless, the student who moments earlier on the playground passed easily into the category of “normal-child-at-play” is now expe- riencing difficulty aligning their body and mind with the decidedly different rules and expectations of classroom conduct. Because of this, their body shifts between categories, classed as normal in one context and abnormal in another. This scenario is no doubt further complicated if we look at it through an inter- sectional lens: the student’s embodied attributes such as race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and citizenship inform identity and cannot be separated from one another. While it is true that most people, no matter how hard they try or what choices they make, can never inhabit the category of normal—at least not fully or completely or without the threat of failure—we must nonetheless account for how some bodies are 87 POWER AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES positioned farther away from the normal than others. This has everything to do with power: with historically constituted interlocking systems of privilege and oppression. In her discussion of the school-to-prison pipeline, Nirmala Erevelles (2014) reminds us that while there are no apolitical acts of “labelling” non-normative behaviour in the classroom, power imbalances are made particularly explicit at the intersection of race, class, and disability, where non-normative behaviour is so often criminalized. To return to our example of classroom comportment, if the student in this scenario were, say, a white, female, middle-class six-year-old, their non-normative behaviours may be interpreted differently than if they were a low-income, racialized, male youth. While our discussion here has been premised on an imaginary scenario, the stakes of embodying the normal are very real. Norms influence which bodies are made to naturally appear as more or less worthy of social protections and freedoms or even of life itself. Attending to the disciplinary workings of normalization can thus help to explain how, following Alexis Shotwell (2017), “norms contribute to the death and degradation of people who fall outside currently normative bounds” (p. 156). What is more, in considering the material impacts of multiple, intersecting embodied non- normativities, Shotwell importantly notes, “the further outside the normal—the closer to death” (p. 156). Intersectional understandings of norms and normativity are acutely salient, for example, in contemporary discussions of anti-Black racism and police bru- tality, particularly when considering that up to half of all people killed by police in the United States are disabled (Perry & Carter-Long, 2016; Ritchie, 2017). As Andrea Ritchie (2017) notes: “Actual or perceived disability, including mental illness, has … served as a primary driver of surveillance, policing, and punishment for women and gender-nonconforming people of color throughout US history” (p. 91). Indeed, Ritchie continues, “police are more likely to criminalize and use excessive force against people of color with psychiatric disabilities through a process that law professor Camille A. Nelson terms the ‘disabling of race and the racing of disability’” (p. 93). Because the stakes of passing as normal are so high, and because the normal is only ever inhabited tenuously, normalcy requires continuous upkeep. Normal is therefore not a finite state of being (i.e., something we are or are not in any definitive sense) but, rather, it is a doing (i.e., a practice or performance reliant on the constant repetition of historically and politically constituted gendered, classed, racialized, and ability norms of comportment). In this way, norms “keep us in our places by helping us know how to be ourselves properly and establishing internal and external monitoring systems” (Spade & Wilse, 2016, p. 554). Disciplinary norms, as suggested by Foucault, “make individuals”; they influence how we perceive and ascribe meaning to the bodies of others, and they also influence how we understand and manage our own bodies. As is demonstrated by many of the examples from this section, the disabled body in the contemporary West is routinely understood as, at once, abnormal and problem- atic: the student whose body betrays non-normative behaviours or movements in the classroom; the public transit rider whose body takes longer to get up or sit down; the person of colour with psychiatric disabilities who is detained, incarcerated, or made 88  FASHIONING THE NORMAL BODY the victim of police violence. In each of these examples, we can see how the disabled body is read not only as different (i.e., non-normative) but also as deficient and thus as disruptive to the normal/natural (i.e., good) functioning of the social whole. What these examples also show us is that the seemingly neutral cultural association between disabled non-normativity and abnormal deficiency is neither natural nor neutral. As the breadth of scholarship and activism in the field of disability studies makes clear, the disabled body is produced through politically and historically constituted cultural norms and their attendant relations of power. Applying Foucault’s theories of power to a discussion of the body of the citizen-worker under industrial capitalism, we can develop a better sense of how normalizing discipline works to determine which bodies are made to fit within a given socio-historical context and which are cast out as unfit. We turn our attention now, and for the remainder of this chapter, to the making of the disabled body under the historically specific socio-economic conditions of capitalism and neoliberal- ism. Often thought to be natural and thus unassailable, contemporary Western under- standings of normal/non-disabled and abnormal/disabled bodies are in fact historically produced through the conditions of industrial and post-industrial labour. Not a Normal Worker: The Creation of Disability as Abnormality As industrial capitalism developed, one of the objects of the disciplinary enclosure of the factory was to train the bodies of workers to match the rhythm and demands of the fac- tory. Workers were subjected to a uniform set of requirements regarding punctuality, the number of hours and days worked, and the application of effort. These imperatives were enforced through a variety of disciplinary penalties: strict time-keeping; fines for late- ness, disobedience, and slow work; and the careful observance of performance. Intensive surveillance required that the worker adapt their body to the shape and rhythms of the machine. Under these particular structural and material conditions, and against the broader social backdrops of colonialism, imperialism, and eugenics, we find that the normative body that is fashioned through the demands of industrialized labour is that of a young, male, able-bodied worker. The industrialization-era version of the normal worker informed not only how much rates of production could be increased, but also influenced the architecture of buildings, urban planning, modes of transportation, the length of the working day, the way in which home and family life were organized, and what was required for labour-power to reproduce itself through sufficient subsistence required for the “normal state as a working individual” (Marx, 1990, p. 275). These normal states, structures, and systems continue to profoundly influence normal condi- tions in the West to this day (e.g., schools continue to be organized around a factory model, with work periods punctuated by break periods) even though factory work is no longer the norm in Western countries. The disciplinary regime of the factory shaped and transformed this “normal” work- ing individual. Against this normative able-bodied labouring subject, disabled bodies 89 POWER AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES came to be understood as bodies that could not produce, or could not produce at an average acceptable rate. As Marx (1990) points out, industrialization and urbanization necessarily produced an “incapable” social stratum that could not sell its labour-power at the average rate of production, a group that was not able to adapt their bodies to the new modes of production that resulted from the change in the division of labour. This left individuals whose bodies did not conform to the unique labour demands of the industrial economy to suffer from the consequences of being excluded from the market: poverty, ill-health, brevity of life, social marginalization, and dependence upon the informal economy (p. 797). This group included not only the “sickly” but also the “mutilated,” the elderly, and “victims of industry” (p. 797). These people form what Marx calls “the dead weight of the industrial reserve army,” the incidental expenses of capitalist production (p. 797). Yet, as Marx shows us, capital is nonetheless adept at offsetting its expenses, transferring liability “from its own shoulders to those of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie” (p. 797). By the late 19th century, many of those deemed “incapable” were incarcerated in workhouses, hospitals, asylums, and “crippleages” (Gleeson, 1999, p. 108). “Disability” as a category thus emerged histori- cally as a “produc[t] of a society invested in denying the variability of the body” so as to invest in, and profit from, the standardized productivity of the normative able-bodied worker (Davis, 1995, p. xv). Indeed, the 1834 British Poor Law made a strict legal distinction between the able- bodied poor who should be compelled to work and the disabled poor, who were con- sidered objects of charity (Gleeson, 1999). Such objects of charity were to be placed in the new national system of workhouses. As Émile Durkheim has noted, “the insane and the sick of certain types, who were heretofore dispersed, [were] banded together from every province and every department into a single enclosure” (1964, p. 188). Higgins further notes that the workhouse was a “pen of inutility”: “The workhouse, the true shrine of the work ethic, was a sort of concentration camp in which were incarcerated, and held up as an example, those who admitted their inutility to capital—the sick, the mad, the handicapped, the unemployed—and in conditions which were even more monstrous than in the factories” (quoted in Gleeson, 1999, p. 105). While the enclosure of the disabled in workhouses was never universal, the subsequent establishment of a network of state-run and charitable hospitals, asylums, and other dedicated institutions for disabled and mad people would, notes Gleeson, “considerably extend the landscape of social dependency” (1999, p. 105). Much of the cultural authority that medicine gained throughout the 19th century was a result of normalizing discourses around the labouring body. That is, medicine, in relation with the emergent discipline of statistics, worked to explain that the inability to labour efficiently under capitalist relations was a natural consequence of physical, intellectual, and psychiatric deviance. Not only did capital disable bodies in excluding them from the valorized work- force, it also created physical impairments in labourers who would have been previously classed as able-bodied. Friedrich Engels (1968) describes the debilitation of labourers in The Condition of the Working Class in England, where he writes: “A number of cripples 90  FASHIONING THE NORMAL BODY gave evidence before the Commission, and it was obvious that their physical condition was due to their long hours of work” (p. 171). He further writes that “it is easy to iden- tify such cripples at a glance, because their deformities are all exactly the same. They are knock-kneed and deformed and the spinal column is bent either forwards or side-ways” (p. 173). Engels explicitly connects such bodily anomalies to the conditions of industrial labour, arguing that miners’ “splayed feet, spinal deformities and other physical defects” could be attributed to “the fact that their constitutions have been weakened and they are nearly always forced to work in a cramped position” (Engels, 1968, p. 280). The workers’ increased dependency on, or indeed their enmeshment with, the machinery of industry led to an increase in the destruction of the fleshly body. Yet, the fact that capital creates disability does not faze capital as capital. At the same time as capital consumes the bodies of its workers (i.e., absorbs their labour power, life-energies), it also marginalizes those it cannot incorporate, seeing them as abnormal. Therefore, with the rise of commodity relations, new forms of labour changed the desired make-up of the social body. More specifically, the political and economic shift lessened the ability of disabled people to make meaningful contributions to their house- holds as their bodies and minds were considered deficient and abnormal. As households became more and more dependent on their members’ competitive sale of labour-power, their ability to host “slow” or “dependent” members was greatly reduced. And so, in the 19th century, the enclosure of work within factories became defined and built in relation to the idealized worker body of the non-disabled male, while women, children, and disabled people increasingly shared a common social status of non-labour, even while women, children, and disabled people frequently participated in certain kinds of factory work as well as low-paid piecework at home. Now, for many in the Global North, labour no longer predominantly takes the form of factory work, and contemporary forms of discipline and power have also shifted. To return to the Dress Normal ad, the image of Moss is not that of a factory labourer, although she does wear the fruits of that labour. Rather, the image frames Moss as a contemporary neoliberal subject—a productive, competitive, entrepreneurial, freelance, flexible subject, who labours continuously to optimize herself, thereby ensuring her value as human capital. Her carefree style in the image masks the attendant credit card debt of continuous consumption, and the self-care she performs—a leisurely walk along the beach—is a kind of optimization of the self that is meant to bolster her resilience. In this image of Moss, we encounter a model of neoliberal flexibility and efficiency. Her “normal” business casual attire might entice us to imagine that she has just popped out of the office, or perhaps, as a mobile freelance worker, this seaside pier is her office. We might imagine her sitting down in the sand, work and play intermingling as she orders her groceries online, answers work emails, and posts to social media. As we have seen, the development of industrial capitalism played a key role in the production of an “incapable” class wherein those bodies and minds that did not fit within the standardized confines of the factory—e.g., the crippled, the maimed, the weak, the sick, the mad—became disabled and, thus, abnormal. With this 91 POWER AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES history in mind, we can, perhaps, better appreciate the ways in which contempo- rary neoliberal social and economic conditions also anticipate the emergence of a new kind of “incapable” body/mind, one that, moreover, seems to blur long-held categorical distinctions between “normal” and “abnormal” bodies. As Jasbir Puar (2012) compellingly argues, under neoliberalism “the distinctions of normative and nonnormative, disabled and nondisabled do not hold up as easily” (p. 154). Instead, she contends, there “are variegated aggregates of capacity and debility” (p. 154). Therefore, the key question of the normal body in the 21st century is not “Is this a normal body or not?” but rather “How normal is this body; how amenable is it to normative enhancements or optimization?” This means that the 21st-century neoliberal normal is, on the one hand, more inclusive than, say, the normal under industrialization: we might, for example see evidence of the normative inclusion of bodies previously classed as abnormal in the mainstream media or in social policy (e.g., racialized bodies, disabled bodies, women’s bodies, queer bodies, etc.). On the other hand, however, this “new” normal is not as inclusive as it would seem at first blush. Participation in the neoliberal entrepreneurial economy normalizes the func- tions of global capital that require that some bodies be enhanced or capacitated at the expense of others. For Moss to “dress like nobody is watching” requires the exact process of normalization that erases the historical and political conditions that bring this norm into being in the first place. We turn now to a consideration of the (labour) conditions through which some bodies—including, we note, a minority of highly privileged disabled bodies—are incorporated into neoliberal norms and discuss how such inclusions work to normalize the exclusion of other, often multiply marginalized, bodies. The Capacitation and Debilitation of Bodies under Neoliberalism Like the Gap ad, the Tommy Hilfiger ad also in Figure 3.1 is another example of how normalcy is fashioned. Here again, we see bodies being fashioned as normal in ways that are, at once, literal (i.e., via normative fashion or style of dress) and figural (i.e., via specific cultural, political, and economic values). What makes this Hilfiger ad particu- larly interesting to us is how it includes the disabled body in the category of normal: the Hilfiger ad depicts two laughing, fashionably dressed white disabled subjects—a woman with a futuristic high-tech prosthetic arm and a man using a wheelchair. This normative inclusion appears in stark relief against, as we have seen throughout this chapter, a long history of disability exclusion; it marks a clear departure from the everyday assump- tion that the mark of disability disqualifies a body from participating in narratives of normalcy. A closer look at the Hilfiger ad can teach us something about the increased porousness and flexibility of the neoliberal normal and the distinctive ways it governs, controls, and hierarchizes bodies. 92  FASHIONING THE NORMAL BODY The ad is selling “Tommy Adaptive,” Tommy Hilfiger’s adaptive clothing line, which promises both “iconic design” and “easy dressing” (usa.tommy.com/en/tommy-adap- tive). This collection showcases clothes designed with a variety of access features—e.g., magnetic zippers, Velcro closures, adjustable hems, and so on—that promise to make it easier, according to Tommy Hilfiger himself, for “differently abled adults” to “express themselves for fashion” while also—as is required of any good neoliberal body—to do so independently. Says Hilfiger, “inclusivity and the democratization of fashion have always been at the core of my brand’s DNA” (Bash, 2017). In the ad, we can see how the inter- sections of gender, disability, race, and class work together to produce some embodied subjects as seemingly naturally deserving of normative inclusions, while leaving others outside of normalcy’s protective embrace. Of course, far from being democratic, this kind of high-end adaptive clothing produces classed (and thus also raced and gendered) divisions within disability communities in the Global North. The Hilfiger line marks out for inclusion those few disabled subjects who can have access to costly normalizing clothing from the majority of disabled people, who, in this era of neoliberal austerity, remain underhoused, underemployed, underinsured, and underserviced, and who are therefore unlikely to have “easy” access to designer pants and sweaters (McRuer, 2018; Puar, 2017). What is more, at the same time as it creates divisions within the category of disability in the Global North, the ready-made garment industry anticipates the produc- tion of disability in the Global South. In April 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight-story garment factory just outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, which made clothing for Joe Fresh and other “fast-fashion” brands, col- lapsed, trapping thousands of workers inside. Just one day after the building was declared unsafe due to the discovery of large cracks in the walls, the Rana Plaza col- lapse killed 1,138 people and injured over 2,600, making it the worst garment factory disaster and among the most significant industrial disasters in recent memory. It can be argued that such fast-fashion factory disasters represent a particularly neoliberal kind of problem. In keeping with the market demands of a globalized, neoliberal economy, North American and Western European chains such as Gap, H&M, and Tommy Hilfiger rely on various shortcuts and subcontracts to facilitate garment pro- duction that is both quick and cheap. For example, large garment industry corpora- tions in Dhaka often focus on quick turnaround and strict delivery deadlines—taking fashion from the catwalk to the everyday consumer in mere weeks—putting increased pressure on suppliers that have led to safety shortcuts, such as those that occurred with Rana Plaza. Despite years of public shaming and a variety of post-Rana Plaza safety agreements and labour reforms, the $28 billion apparel industry in Bangladesh remains a long way from being safe. It is estimated that there are 5,000–6,000 garment factories and facili- ties in Bangladesh, making it the second largest garment manufacturer in the world, employing over 4 million people, mostly women. Of these facilities, it is estimated that as many as 2,000 are unregistered, unregulated, and “so far removed from oversight and operate on such small margins” that they are unlikely to be affected by “inspection 93 POWER AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES and remediation regimes” (Labowitz & Baumann-Pauly, 2014, pp. 22–23) even if they were offered. Because of these ongoing hazardous labour conditions, in addition to producing cheap clothes in narrow timeframes, the fast-fashion industry also produces, in its workers, various kinds of bodily debilitations. Many studies have tracked the range of adverse health effects brought on by garment factory conditions, citing depression, vision disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, and respiratory abnormalities as bodily con- ditions commonly experienced by garment industry workers (Villanueva, Fitch, Quadir, Sagiraju, & Alamgir, 2017). Indeed, in Bangladesh, it is estimated that occupational injuries account for more than 8 per cent of all disabilities in the population (Villanueva et al., 2017). While neither Tommy Hilfiger nor Gap were directly linked to the Rana Plaza fac- tory disaster, these companies both regularly produce their products in unsafe garment factories in Bangladesh, where wages remain the lowest in the world (a normal wage for a garment worker is US$68 per month). Indeed, both Gap and Hilfiger were among a group of manufacturers whose clothing was being produced at the site of a 2010 fire in the Ashulia industrial zone just outside of Dhaka that claimed nearly 30 lives and left over 100 injured. The fire broke out on the 10th floor of the factory, which did not have proper fire escapes, forcing many of the workers to break windows and jump out of the building in an attempt to escape the blaze. We argue that the Hilfiger adaptive line exemplifies and reproduces “neoliberalism’s heightened demands for bodily capacity, even as this same neoliberalism marks out populations for what Lauren Berlant has described as ‘slow death’—the debilitating ongoingness of structural inequality and suffering” (Puar, 2017, p. 149). The fact that a minority of disabled people (typically white, wealthy people living in the Global North) can afford to buy products that (may) help them to bring their bodies closer to the requirements of neoliberal normativity does not address the significant and harmful social and structural inequities that flow from compulsory normativity. These kinds of fast, flexible, consumer-based social enhancements are, at best, a tenuous solution: they leave the included minority in a position of precarity, dependent on acts of consumption as a means of securing social worth. They also, as we have seen, work dangerously to normalize the debilitation and perpetual exclusion of the disabled majority (typically non-white, low-income people living in the Global South). As with all forms of power, normalizing power invariably works to cultivate cultures of resistance. On 24 April 2014, thousands of workers and their unions rallied across Bangladesh to mark the one-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster, demanding fair wages, safe working conditions, and compensation for injured workers. Among these protesters were the disabled survivors of the Rana collapse and other factory disasters, the vast majority of whom, due to inaccessible workplace environments or bodily limitations, are unable to work and/or receive disability supports (Fitch et al., 2015; Villanueva et al., 2017). In Figure 3.2 we encounter a photograph of a picketer attending a one-year anniversary rally. Holding up a protest sign with the handwrit- ten words “I don’t want to die for fashion,” she stares confidently at the camera with an expression that seems to tether outrage with defiance. Recalling Michalko (2002), 94  FASHIONING THE NORMAL BODY FIGURE 3.2 2014 photograph of a demonstrator attending a rally on the one-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory disaster. Credit: Solidarity Center/Sifat Sharmin Amita. normalcy’s cultural power depends on a process of camouflage. Therefore, Michalko (2009) reminds us, any attempt to disrupt the violence of normativity must first “look” at normal and “atten[d] to its production” (p. 91). In contrast to Gap’s appeal to a neoliberal normalcy that is invisible and unseen, and against the backdrop of normative neoliberal practices that derive cultural power from their invisibility, this protester—and the thousands of garment workers with whom she forms a collective—looks directly at the normal conditions of labouring bodies in the Global South. This act of looking marks out the normal ways some lives are rendered less valuable or more disposable, and names the relational, material violence of this debilitation. Conclusion: Normative Failures Gap’s “Dress Normal” campaign turned out to be a spectacular failure: the brand’s sales dropped between 4 and 5 per cent in the weeks and months following the launch of the campaign. Stores were forced to offer massive discounts on merchandise in their “normal” 95 POWER AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES line, and Gap’s chief marketing officer left the company less than a year after the cam- paign’s launch (Bloomberg, 2016). Not surprisingly, the marketing failure received its fair share of industry ridicule. “Gap faces a world that doesn’t want to be normal anymore,” reads a Bloomberg headline (Bhasin, 2016). “There is such thing as too much of a meh thing,” reports Isha Aran, writing for Jezebel. “People don’t want to actually be normal,” she contends, “they just want to lay claim to the ‘normal’ aesthetic” (Aran, 2014). It is certainly easy, at first glance, to interpret the failure of the Gap campaign as an indication that consumers just don’t want to dress or be normal. However, as we’ve seen throughout this chapter, the cultural power of normal extends well beyond the realm of personal choice. To occupy the position of the normal—that is to say, to have one’s body and mind cohere with historically particular cultural norms—offers a great many rewards and social protections. This provisional subjectivity, as we have explored, functions to stave off the various punishments—i.e., forms of interpersonal, state, and/ or structural violence—that flow from having one’s body/mind cast outside of the nor- mative frames of cultural intelligibility. As Michael Warner (2000) accurately notes, “nearly everyone wants to be normal, and who can blame them, if the alternative is being abnormal, or deviant, or not being one of the rest of us? Put in those terms, there doesn’t seem to be a choice at all” (p. 53). To say, simply, that “people don’t want to be normal” is to “produc[e] and cove[r] over, with the appearance of choice … a system in which there actually is no choice” (McRuer, 2006, p. 7). In his search for how we might subvert this system of compulsory normativity, Robert McRuer (2006) turns to the work of Judith Butler. “There is no guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of [the normal] will lead to its subversion,” warns Butler (quoted in McRuer, 2006, p. 30). With this in mind, the failure of the Gap campaign is not so much that the company merely “missed the mark” on consumer desires or fashion trends (O’Reilly, 2014). Rather, we contend, the campaign’s principal failure flows from its failure to sustain normalcy’s camouflage. In other words, the Gap ad invites consumers not only to look more normal but also, and because of this, to look at the normal, a form of visibility that works to undermine normalcy’s cultural authority and power. Over the course of this chapter, we have mobilized normalcy’s failure to camouflage so as to expose normal for what it is: situated, contingent, material, rela- tional, and deeply political. We do this with the hope that this might, following Butler, “work the weakness of the norm” so we can collectively move toward more capacious understandings of human bodies and human value (quoted in McRuer, 2006, p. 30). Study Questions 1 Explain in your own words how the Gap ad both shows the viewer what is normal and also instructs its viewer to be normal. 2 Why do the authors suggest that it is not enough to include more kinds of people or different forms of embodiment in the category of the normal? 96  FASHIONING THE NORMAL BODY 3 Why do you think normal is so difficult to notice? How can the non-normative body help us to better perceive a camouflaged normalcy and therefore learn about the social conditions of power? 4 Think of a variety of historical or contemporary examples where the category of normal has been used to govern and control the bodies and minds of people. How might a critique of the normal provide a basis for intersectional coalition building? Exercises 1 Situate yourself in a public space. What strikes you as normal and abnormal? How did you come to think of what you perceived as being normal or abnormal? 2 Choose an object from your everyday life (e.g., your cell phone or computer, a favourite article of clothing, a childhood toy, a chair in your classroom, a course syllabus). What particular body or mind does the object anticipate as its “normal” user? How does the object reflect cultural understandings of desirable/ undesirable bodies? For an example of how objects anticipate and shape normal and abnormal bodies, see the authors’ discussion of the ways bus seat size and arrangement produce normative and non-normative bodies. Follow up question: How might your object be used in different, unexpected, or non-normative ways? 3 This exercise asks you to think critically about the selfie—or the self-taken photograph—as a cultural artefact worthy of analysis. Look back at two or three selfies that you have taken in the past (or take several new images), and reflect on the selfie as a presentation of self. How have you chosen to fashion your body in and through your images? What bodily norms do these selfies reproduce? How does your body show up in the images in ways that are beyond your choosing? Follow up question: Do you think selfies can open up new and non-normative ways of making bodies visible? Why or why not? References Aran, I. (2014, October 22). 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