February 2021 – History of The Human Sciences

Review: Physics and Psychics

Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; 403pp; Paperback £24,99; ISBN: 978-1-107-18854-9

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira

What is ‘science’ – and, as a corollary, ‘non-science’? What does it mean for something to be called ‘scientific’? And is ‘science’ an objective, singular entity, or is it conditioned by culture? These questions have provoked some of the most fascinating scholarly debates over the past two centuries, precisely the period during which ‘science’ (however defined) gradually became the standard of truth in most societies across the globe. These concerns – sometimes called ‘the demarcation problem’ – far exceed the immediate purview of philosophers and historians of science, having lasting consequences in fields such as education, medicine and public policy. Philosophers like Karl R. Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have shown that to define ‘science’ is far more complicated than we might initially assume.[1] Over the past few years, their (often contrasting) views have inspired a wave of ground-breaking historical works on the ‘fringe sciences,’ those disciplines and subjects – such as mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical research and parapsychology– rejected by ‘mainstream’ scientists for not conforming with their own ideological agenda.

Physics and Psychics belongs to this revisionist tradition of scholarship in the history of science and technology. Richard Noakes has for years looked at the cooperation and contention between the physical sciences – fields like chemistry, physics and astronomy – and the occult in fin-de-siècle Britain. Physics and Psychics not only reunites his latest works on telegraphy, ether and psychics but also goes beyond, calling into question the popular, hasty definitions of ‘science’ and ‘non-science’ (or ‘pseudoscience’). It centres on the lives and activities of eminent British physical scientists who split their time between physical experiments and psychical investigation. Noakes calls these individuals ‘physical-psychical scientists’, an etic category that highlights their primary background as practitioners of the physical sciences while distinguishing them from the broader community of spiritualists, conjurers and psychical researchers also interested in the study of psychical phenomena. ‘Psychic’ (also called ‘psychical’, ‘supernormal’ or ‘paranormal’) refers to a wide range of phenomena not contemplated by mainstream science and often labelled as ‘supernatural’, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, levitation and spirit materialisation. To physical-psychical scientists like Oliver Lodge, William Crookes and William F. Barrett, however, there was nothing ‘supernatural’ in all this. Indeed, they endeavoured precisely to demonstrate, by empirical means, that psychical phenomena belonged to the realm of nature and, therefore, constituted legitimate objects of scientific inquiry.

The heyday of physical-psychical research coincided with the formative period of modern scientific disciplines, when the boundaries of such fields as physics and chemistry were relatively fluid and constantly challenged in light of new discoveries, methods and theories. Physical-psychical scientists argued that a systematic study of psychical phenomena could not only expand the purview of the physical sciences beyond the recognised spheres of matter and energy but, ultimately, revolutionise our understanding of the universe, of life and death. Who were the British physical scientists interested in psychical investigation? What drove their enthusiasm for the subject? How did they negotiate their position as physical scientists and psychical researchers? To what extent did their achievements in physics profit from their studies in psychics, and vice-versa? These are some of the main concerns running through Physics and Psychics.

Noakes draws on a remarkable wealth of primary sources, ranging from diaries and personal letters to specialised journals, wide-circulation newspapers, illustrations and books. The methodological sophistication of Physics and Psychics also deserves praise. In contrast to studies that tend to label such subjects as psychical research, spiritualism and Theosophy as ‘superstition’ or ‘pseudoscience’, Noakes favours ‘alternative sciences’ as a framework through which to accommodate disciplines or subjects not contemplated in fin-de-siècle scientific orthodoxy. As a medical historian working on psychical research and the occult in early twentieth-century China, I find the category of ‘alternative sciences’ particularly valuable. It helps historians of China appreciate the emergence of ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學) – the Nippo-Chinese offspring of the Anglo-American psychical research – in the 1910s not as a backlash reaction to science and modernity but rather as an alternative to scientific materialism, ontological dualism and the worldview that everything in the universe is mere matter and motion. Indeed, my reading of Physics and Psychics is concerned primarily with the transnational history of fin-de-siècle psychical research, particularly its development in East Asia.

The book is divided into six chapters. It begins in the first half of the nineteenth century, the formative period of the physical sciences. Chapter 1 explores how mesmerism, Karl von Reichenbach’s theory of od and the emergence of Modern Spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century inspired British physical scientists to appreciate the scientific study of psychical and occult phenomena as extensions of the nascent discipline of physics. They celebrated Mesmer’s discovery of a new physical force – animal magnetism – as having the potential to revolutionise people’s understanding of the human body, reconcile science and religion, and eventually clarify the underlying causes of such ‘inexplicable’ and ‘remarkable’ phenomena like mind-reading, thought-transference and spirit materialisation. The potential to investigate psychical phenomena through scientific means led a group of eminent British scientists and intellectuals to establish the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) in London in 1882. Centred on the SPR, chapter 2 teases out the identities and networks of physical-psychical scientists. Dissatisfied with the limitations of Christian orthodoxy and scientific materialism, this group included not only official members of the SPR but a broader community of high-ranking scientists whose interest in psychics often predated the Society’s foundation, and whose sustained commitment to psychical investigation went beyond the Society’s umbrella.

The next three chapters look at the physical-psychical scientists’ view that psychical phenomena belonged to the natural (=material) realm and, therefore, deserved scientific investigation. Chapter 3 examines how those scientists envisaged the relevance of the physical sciences – their theories, methods and experiments – to clarify the mechanisms of the psychical world. The physical sciences offered not only a scientific framework through which to investigate psychical phenomena but also furnished a set of tools for physical-psychical scientists to draw analogies between the visible and invisible realms of existence. Their latest achievements in electricity, telegraphy and ether, for example, suggested that psychical phenomena were not as impossible or ‘supernatural’ as some might have once assumed, and that physical experiments could enhance our understanding of the same. Indeed, Fukurai Tomokichi’s 福来友吉 (1869–1952) invention of thoughtography – the ability to imprint mental images onto photographic plates – in the mid-1900s,[2] and the myriad of early twentieth-century Japanese and Chinese articles and books explaining the reality of telepathy and clairvoyance in terms of electricity, ether and wireless telegraphy indicate that the analogies proposed by British physical-psychical scientists enjoyed an impressive transnational audience.

Following, Noakes turns to the laboratory as a shared space for physical and psychical investigation. While the use of scientific instruments yielded some positive evidence for the reality of certain psychical effects – like table-rapping and telekinesis – experimental work also posed new challenges. The unavailability of reliable mediums or difficulty to see, control and replicate paranormal phenomena in the laboratory led many practitioners of the physical sciences to doubt the feasibility of psychical research. Despite this, psychical experimentation inspired creative uses of the physical sciences to an extent far greater than historians have so far recognised. Not everyone agreed that physical scientists were the most suited to study psychical matters, though. Chapter 5 examines the debates between spiritualists, psychologists, psychical researchers, conjurers and physicists regarding who could claim authority in psychical investigation. Unsurprisingly, the most outspoken defenders of the physical expertise were the same familiar individuals who were engaged in shaping the boundaries of the physical sciences in Britain’s public sphere. Physical theories, methods and experimental work, they declared, ranked as the most appropriate to decipher the puzzles underlying the cause and reality of psychical effects.

The final chapter is probably the most insightful to scholars working on the popularisation of psychical research beyond the United Kingdom. Noakes turns from the debates taking place in laboratories and scientific journals to the engagement of physical-psychical scientists in the dissemination of psychical research – its methods, achievements and social uses – through mass media and popular scientific literature. Focused on Oliver Lodge, Noakes shows how wide-circulation newspapers, popular books and lecture halls became important venues where physical-psychical scientists could expose ideas deemed inappropriate in secularised scientific settings, such as the reconciliation of science and religion, the survival of the soul after death, and the physical effects happening in spiritualist seances.

Persuaded by Noakes’s argument that Lodge stood as a prominent figure in early British radio broadcasting often called upon to illuminate the latest discoveries in physics to a broader audience, I looked for some visual evidence to satisfy my curiosity about what had made Lodge’s public appearances so special – the ‘thing’ written records cannot fully capture. Searching on YouTube, I was thrilled by a short video titled ‘Sir Oliver Lodge Renders Science Intelligible’, originally aired on British Movietone on 31 December 1930.[3]

Praising Lodge as ‘one of the greatest scientists of modern times’ who ‘needs no introduction to British audiences’, the film presents a charismatic old man in his early 80s playing with a device wherein a highly magnetic piece of cobalt steel seems to be levitating or ‘floating in empty space in vacuum.’ To demonstrate magnetic attraction and repulsion, Lodge then brings two pieces of steel up to each other. ‘As we can see’, Lodge explains, the piece ‘runs away’, they ‘don’t like each other; they chase each other’. But when he reverses them, then ‘they like each other very much.’ Using everyday experiments and lively language, Lodge illustrates what Noakes explored thoroughly in this book: how insights in physics – here, in magnetism – can help illuminate the causes and reality of psychical phenomena, if not life and death as a whole. If we understand ‘all the actors in the relation between ether and matter, or let’s say, between space and matter, we might begin to understand something more of what life and mind really are.’ After the proper appraisal of scientific evidence, Lodge concludes, ‘if the result is that personalities continue to exist then they must have a physical vehicle for that existence,’ a substance or entity ‘which fills space and which is a far more important thing than any form of matter’, which becomes ‘a trivial thing in comparison.’ That revolutionary thing refers to Lodge’s cherished ‘ether’.[4]

By the 1920s, some of Lodge’s most best-selling books in physics and psychics – including The Substance of Faith Allied with Science,[5] Survival of Man[6] and Raymond or Life and Death[7] – had already been rendered into Japanese alongside hundreds of newspaper articles and interviews on science and religion, ether and psychical research. An important channel for Chinese elites fascinated by hypnosis, telepathy and clairvoyance, Japan played a key role in the dissemination of Western psychical research in China. Publications about the latest achievements of British scientists like Lodge, Barrett and Crookes featured prominently in the Chinese popular press during the first half of the twentieth century. These typically comprised book excerpts and newspaper articles translated from English into Japanese, and then from Japanese into Chinese. These publications were decisive in the formation of Spiritual Science therein. For instance, in a review of the Claude’s Book – prefaced by Lodge – a Chinese writer praises the British scientist as ‘the physicist of the afterlife’, whose ‘established reputation had encouraged us to take the subject of psychical phenomena seriously’.[8]

Despite Noakes’ flowing prose, Physics and Psychics is dense reading. But while focused on the British context, the book is a must-read to anyone working on the transnational history of spiritualism and psychical research. Noakes makes an important contribution to a recent body of work, which calls for spiritualism and psychical research to become legitimate subjects in the history of science, medicine and religion. It sheds much-needed light on the question of how religion and the occult have helped shape the boundaries of modern science, a concern with global implications.

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira (林友樂) is a PhD student in the Department of History at UCL. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, his research project investigates the transnational history of spiritualism and psychical research in early twentieth-century China. It looks at the formation of ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學), its impact on healthcare and religious experience. His areas of interest include modern Chinese history, medical history, esotericism, and science and technology studies, and he has published in Portuguese, Chinese and English.

[1] Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1975).

[2] Tomokichi, Fukurai. Clairvoyance & Thoughtography (London: Rider & Company, 1931).

[3] British Movietone, “Sir Oliver Lodge Renders Science Intelligible and Mr Sanger – Sound,” YouTube Video, 4:29, 21 July 2015, https://youtu.be/A4uOdx_dQBs.

[4] On Lodge and ether, see Noakes, Richard, “Making Space for the Soul: Oliver Lodge, Maxwellian Psychics and the Etherial Body,” in Jaume Navarro, ed, Ether and Modernity: The Recalcitrance of an Agonising Object in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 88–106; Noakes, Richard, “Glorifying Mechanism: Oliver Lodge and the Problems of Ether, Mind, and Matter,” in James Mussell and Graeme Gooday, eds, A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 135–152.

[5] Kagaku yori mitaru shinkō no honshitsu 科学より観たる信仰の本質, trans. Ōno Yoshimaro 大野芳麿 (Tokyo: Rakuyōdō, 1921).

[6] Shigo no seizon 死後の生存, trans. Takahashi Gorō 高橋五郎 (Tokyo: Genkōsha, 1917); Shinrei seikatsu 心霊生活, trans. Fujī Hakūn 藤井白雲 (Tokyo: Dai Nihon bunmei kyōkai kankōsho, 1917).

[7] Reimondo meikai tsūshin レイモンド冥界通信, trans. Takahashi Gorō (Tokyo: Uchū reizō kenkyū kyōkai, 1918); Takai ni aru aiji yori no shōsoku 他界にある愛児よりの消息, trans. Nojiri Hōei 野尻抱影 (Tokyo: Shinkōsha, 1922).

[8] “Weilai shenghuo zhi xinjieshi 未來生活之新解釋” (New Explanations on the Afterlife), Dongfang zazhi 17, no. 6 (1920): 53–54.

Histories of sexology today – interview with Katie Sutton

‘Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis’ is the current issue of History of the Human Sciences, guest edited by Kirsten Leng and Katie Sutton. Special issue co-editor Katie Sutton spoke to the journal’s web editor Hannah Proctor about how the essays in the issue contribute to extending our understandings of histories of sexology.

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HHS: First of all, could you say a little about the genesis of the Special Issue? What did you, as editors, hope to achieve with this collection of essays?

KS: Kirsten Leng and I have both been working in various areas of the history of sexology for some time and with this special issue we really wanted to push some of the boundaries of the field.

Michel Foucault influentially turned his attention to the history of sexual science in the History of Sexuality and since then there’s been a tendency to prioritize certain kinds of analytical questions within the field – for example, how has our understanding of homosexuality developed over time? Or, how have scientists gone about diagnosing “deviants”? This has been a history with a decidedly Western, male, white and European focus. The history of sexology has also often been limited to the “medical” and “scientific”. We were interested in opening up the historiography in more interdisciplinary directions, including by problematizing the disciplinary boundaries of the field from its very early days onwards. We were also interested in how we could use this issue to explore more of the transnational connections that have influentially shaped this field across time, as well as pushing further at questions around gender and intersectionality that historians have been turning their attention to in recent years.

In these respects, this issue connects in interesting ways to a debate that was published a couple of years ago in this journal between Heike Bauer and Ivan Crozier, a back and forth about the disciplinary limits of sexology that asked, among other things, how we might use concepts like translation to push those a bit further.

In your introduction you discuss the historiography of sexology, which, as you point out is still relatively young – how do you see the essays in this collection as intervening in or extending this historiography?

Firstly, in a geographic sense. The essays extend a historiography that has often focused on Western European and specific national contexts. For example, they shed light on how Eastern European sexologies and sexologists crossed the iron curtain during the Cold War era, or the prominence of North American thinkers at various key moments.

Secondly, they extend it by looking backwards and forwards in time. We’ve got essays such as Benjamin Kahan’s, which looks right back to the mid 19th century in the US, but we also have pieces that look forward through to the post World War II era. These expand the parameters of a historigoraphy that has tended to focus on the early 20^th century.

But as well as pushing at conventional limitations of space and time, we were interested, as I’ve already noted, in approaching questions of disciplinarity in more open ways. For example, one essay engages explicitly with animal studies, and shows how scientists turned to the natural world to make new kinds of arguments about human sexual and gender diversity. As Ina Linge shows in this essay, animal research has always been part of the sexological project, but it has been a decidedly neglected aspect of historical scholarship. Other essays in this issue explore the porous boundaries between sexology and various traditions of psychotherapy (both Western Freudian traditions and Eastern European traditions of Pavlovian psychotherapy), as well as with fields more at the edges of scientific tradition, such as phrenology and transcendentalism.

How do you see scholarship on the history of sexology as contributing to explorations of ‘the relationship between sexual knowledge and sexual politics’?

Ina Linge’s piece is a good example of this. It shows not only how research into intersex moths and butterflies in early 20th century Germany was used to make arguments about the naturalness of sex and gender variation, but also how the scientists very consciously applied their experimental findings to quite politicized arguments around decriminalizing homosexuality, particularly during the Weimar Republic.

Another good example is Kate Davison’s essay, which opens up questions around the understudied context of sexual politics in the Cold War. Sexologists in socialist countries were examining homosexuality just as their colleagues on the other side of the iron curtain were. Yet the history of gay “conversion” therapies in Czechoslovakia points to more progressive paths than were taken elsewhere. Researchers there argued for legal reforms around homosexality, but their ideas were taken in much less politically progressive directions when they were drawn on, selectively, by scientists in the West.

These essays also contribute to thinking about sexual politics and sexual science in relation to race. Scholars such as Heike Bauer and Laurie Marhoefer have shown that racializing frameworks have always been a critical, if often invisible, part of how sexual scientific knowledge was produced and conceptualized. Such ideas have continued to shape our thinking, though often in quite implicit ways, such as by feeding the colour blindness of much contemporary LGBTQ politics. Even someone quite progressive like Magnus Hirschfeld, who is often lauded as a left-wing pioneer of gay rights, was very much tied up in imperialist and rationalizing frameworks, from which we haven’t quite extricated ourselves, even in the present. Benjamin Kahan’s piece is an example of work that furthers this project by pushing at the racial dimensions of some of the earliest sexological thought, and showing how this was tied up with discussions in other fields such as phrenology that were thoroughly infused with underlying racializing and racist thought.

Finally, recent work has started to pay more attention to rethinking the place of pleasure and desire in the history of the sexual sciences. What are the political implications of bringing pleasure and ideas of the erotic back into the equation? Sarah Bull’s piece on the complex relationships between sex researchers and erotic and explicit print cultures does this particularly well, but this is a question that has often been sidelined.

As you underline in the introduction, one of the strengths of the issue is its emphasis on transnational conversations between sexologists –what was significant about these kinds of exchanges?

We’ve tended to do research that has been quite constrained by national boundaries, or sometimes by the linguistic boundaries of the German speaking world or the English speaking world. We’ve also often tended to assume that there was a distinctly German origin of modern sexual science. But if we pay a bit more attention to the conversations that were always going on, such as between North American and European researchers in the mid 19^th century, we can develop a more nuanced account of sexology as a field that has always looked beyond national boundaries, even from its earliest beginnings.

The trade in erotic books and the non-scientific circulations of medical and scientific writing on sex discussed by Bull is a good example here. Erotic book trade dealers in North America saw a strong market in trading in European sexual scientific works in the 1930s and 1940s, and publishing new editions of works by sexologists like Havelock Ellis. These kinds of circulations brought ideas that had been originally formulated in a distinctly medical-scientific space to a much wider mid-century US audience of lay readers.

Ina Linge’s essay explores how research into ‘intersex butterflies’ influenced sexologists at the Institute of Sexology in Germany. What are the implications of the case she makes for ‘paying attention to non-human actors in the history of sexology’?

Ina Linge’s essay, which we touched on earlier, makes a strong case for paying more attention to non-human actors in the history of sexual science. Many of us may know that Kinsey, for example, made a name for himself studying insects before he turned his attention to his students at Indiana University and human sexual behaviors, but in general, animals have been sorely lacking from the historiography of sexology, and that’s not really justified. When you look at the earliest sexological journals, animal research, along with ethnological comparisons, were frequently used as reference points. What was naturally occurring in animals could be used to argue for what was also naturally occurring in humans, and for what by extension could be considered “normal” or legally justifiable. Similarly, my co-editor Kirsten Leng has shown that German feminists in this era were busy drawing on nature comparisons to justify their political demands as in line with what nature intended.

Linge points out that pop culture today is really fascinated with stories about queer animals, such as penguins showing same-sex desires. Those comparisons tend to be used to argue for the naturalness of sex and gender variation in humans as well, and what Linge does that is new is to situate these comparative moves in that early 20th century moment. She draws on what Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal have referred to as the ‘moral authority of nature’ to show how some scientists were starting to advocate for more progressive sexual politics. Jewish German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt knew very well when he was publishing his research on intersex moths that this might be drawn on to make political points about humans as well, especially when it came to defending homosexuality. These kinds of analogy were intensely politicized in Germany at that time because of the criminalization of gay sex under Paragraph 175. At the same time, Linge’s essay shows how these ‘natural is normal’ arguments could be put to more sinister use, such as by those arguing against interracial sexual contact or in favor of sterilizing homosexual men.

A series of intersexual females of *Lymantria dispar*, R. Goldschmidt, *The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination* (1923)

Sarah Bull’s contribution, which explores the relationship between sexual science and erotic print culture, raises questions about respectability and the sources of scientific knowledge – what light does this shed on what she describes as the ‘porous’ boundaries of sexology as a discipline?

Sarah Bull’s piece really problematizes those border areas between sexual science, on the one hand (with practitioners working to establish a respectable scientific field of inquiry not weighed down by older notions of religion, morality and taboo), and on the other hand, ways of looking and talking about sex that were more aligned with traditions of erotica and pornography. From the late 19th century British sexologists in particular were constantly vulnerable to censorship, prosecutions and to their works being labeled obscene, although censorship was also an important factor shaping the development of sexual science elsewhere.

Bull shows that sexual scientists were both loudly disavowing any connection to these seemingly dubious realms of smut and porn, but, at the same time, they were absolutely dependent on those “grey” areas of the publishing world for their evidence. They were also dependent on them for disseminating new kinds of knowledge about sex, including across national boundaries, as I mentioned earlier. She points out that the borders between these fields were always porous, but they were also always policed, with appeals to “science” often used to justify protecting work from the censors.

She points to some interesting examples of that porosity over time, especially as erotic literature traders began republishing older sexological works and circulating across their original national origins in ways that targeted less specialist audiences. By the 1970s sexologists were themselves publishing in erotic magazines like Playboy. There is still a lot that we don’t know about these interplays between the “erotic” and the “scientific” in the history of sexology.

You highlight the importance of ‘balancing sexology’s global dimensions with its regional specificities’. Both your essay and Benjamin Kahan’s contributions examine sexology in the US at different historical moments – what was distinctive about the trajectory of sexological research in North America?

This is a really interesting question and I like how you bring those two pieces together, because they do speak to different ends of the history of sexology in North America, which has often played second fiddle to its European counterparts.

Kahan’s piece, which we touched on earlier, shows how mid-19th century American researchers such as Elizabeth Osgood were highly influential in coining key terms in sexual science, as early as several decades before terms like ‘Sexualwissenschaft’ were introduced in Germany. My own work as a cultural historian of Germany, meanwhile, has tended to follow the narrative around the German “invention” of modern sexuality—an explanation that sees the German speaking world as crucial in coming up with many of the identity categories, such as “homosexual” or “trans” identities, that have stayed with us in into the present. But Kahan’s work shows that if we pay more attention to North American actors, and to what was going on in science-adjacent fields like phrenology and transcendentalism, then we can develop much more nuanced and transnational narratives of the sexual sciences.

My piece hones in on Kinsey’s research in the late 1940s and 1950s. I do see sexology as shifting its global centre of gravity in this period, from the German speaking world following the rise of the Nazis across the Atlantic to North America. Many Jewish medical practitioners, analysts, and scientists emigrated from Europe to North America, and they shifted these conversations in very distinct ways. By the mid twentieth century North America had become the international centre of both sexology and psychoanalysis, but we also need to examine the distinctly national interests that shaped these disciplines in that context, such as the fundamental shifts in US psychoanalysis compared to early Freudian thinking due to the prominence of a certain brand of Protestant Christianity.

Finally, would it be possible to reflect on how work into the historiography of sexology engages with the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ as historical categories?

I would say that work on the historiography of sexology has played a key role in encouraging researchers working across all sorts of fields, not just the history of sexuality, to engage more critically with ideas of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ – to ask how these categories have changed over time and to recognise that they’ve always been historically contingent. There are some really interesting connections between the essays in this special issue and those in another issue coming out soon in the History of the Human Sciences on the history of normality (edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens). Their work and work by scholars such as Laura Doan shows that the “normal” has always been a contested and contingent idea, and one that only really came to carry the meanings it does now in the mid 20th century. Some of this critical attention on the “normal” is now also shifting to the “natural”, with scholars pushing at how the natural and the normal are sometimes seen as interchangeable categories, but also how and where they can, or must, be teased apart.