sexology – History of The Human Sciences

Normality – interview with Peter Cryle

The current special issue of the History of the Human Sciences is a collection of essays on Normality, edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, which responds to their co-written book Normality: A Critical Genealogy, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. We discussed the genesis and contents of the special issue with its co-editor Professor Peter Cryle, University of Queensland.

HHS: Before asking you more about the special issue, could you briefly introduce your jointly authored book, Normality: A Critical Genealogy, which was published by Chicago University Press in 2017?

Peter Cryle: Quite often when people are doing research they start off with something that’s a bit of an irritant, something that annoys them and which they wish they could resolve. For me and my friend and colleague Elizabeth Stevens ‘normality’ was a major irritant. We thought the idea was extraordinarily widespread but very poorly analyzed and that it involved all kinds of contradictions.

We had two main options: one was to stop complaining and ignore it, and the other was to try to do the kinds of things that cultural and intellectual historians can do in these circumstances, which is to have a look more closely at this rather messy thematic monster to see if we could nail some things down about it. That’s a way, if you like, for intellectuals to fight back against intellectual messiness. That was our main thought and then we had to go and look for the normal wherever we could find it and make a history out of that.

The two of us worked on it in parallel for about eight years, so we knew at the end we would have a book that would hold together, but we also knew that there were many places that we could have gone to and that there was much more for us to learn about those places. That was the way in which the book led to this special issue. We had a sense that there was much to be done. We had a working seminar in Italy to which we invited most of the people that took part in this special issue. Their thoughts, their contributions and their implicit constructive criticisms of our book provided us with extra material and extra things to think about.

HHS: How do these articles in the Special Issue respond to and expand on the insights of the book?

PC: The most obvious thing that they do is go to some topical and geographical places that we didn’t go to. Even though the term ‘école normale’ became widespread on the basis of French usage, we made a decision fairly early on not to follow this thread of the normal in education because we thought there were more urgent issues around the key themes we were focusing on. We were therefore very pleased to have Caroline Warman come and do a serious history of the first ever normal school, which came together in revolutionary Paris. That was one completing move, if you like.

Others included the work that Kim Hayek did on 19th century French psychology. It might seem odd that although we spent so much time concentrating on France, we didn’t get around to talking more about what happened to psychology in late 19th century France. We followed psychology to the German speaking countries so we left that out and Kim Hayek wrote a very valuable piece that filled in that gap. Indeed, to say she filled in a gap is a bit misleading because she explored things that we hadn’t explored and she enriched what we’d done. Chiara Beccalossi did work of a complimentary kind for us as well, looking at the Latin Catholic world that stretched from southern Europe to Latin America and that followed a kind of normalizing medicine that we had not looked at.

Those are some of the more obvious ways in which these articles complete, compliment and enrich what we’ve done in our book.

HHS: In your introduction you claim that ‘study of the normal lends itself to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary analysis’ – could you explain why or in what ways you think that is the case?

PC: It’s very challenging to work on a history of the normal because of the extraordinary mixture of things that are involved. We knew we were onto something when we found the emergence of the notion of the normal in medical writing in France around 1820, which became very significant from about 1830 onwards. That was one of our key entrees into the whole thing, but we were also aware that in everyday usage in education people talked about normal curves in grading students, for instance. The term ‘normal curve’ was around in some sort of bastardized version of statistical thinking so we went back looking through the history of statistics and, indeed, wrote our own history of statistics in a way, with a focus on how statistical thinking produced the notion of the average.

The notion of the average helped to build one of the key thematic elements of the normal. In addition to that we found that anthropology and anthropometrics became an area in which so much was done to measure normality in people’s bodies. So we looked at the kind of endeavors that went on there, some of them connected with the study of race. Race then became a significant theme in our work. Partly comparable work was also taken up in criminology, especially in Italian criminology, where people claimed to be able to measure the bodies of criminals and identify criminals traits. We found ourselves in a number of different thematic places, each calling for its own kind of disciplinary awareness, although we would claim that there was a coherence.

Later we came to talk about the later 19th century and the history of eugenics, which came out of anthropology and anthrometrology. We then found ourselves confronting the thing which had actually been a trigger for the two of us in many ways, which was the history of sexology and the history of psychoanalysis, where the notion of the normal bulks large. That had initially been our major irritant: the extraordinarily powerful assumptions about normality in those contexts seemed to us to need work done on them in order to lose some of their overweening generality.

HHS: What is the significance of the relationship between the specialist and non-specialist/popular in the history of the term ‘normal’ that you (and/or contributors to the special issue) trace?

PC: Some concepts in the history of science seem to develop in properly and, indeed, in sometimes quite narrowly scientific contexts. Others seem to get out of those more constrained spaces. I think it’s interesting to look at the recent issue of History of the Human Sciences on sexology edited by Katie Sutton and Kirsten Lang. The history of sexology shows how certain terms came into existence in the thinking and the writing of sexologists – terms like homosexuality, autoeroticism and so on –they became great discursive favorites in the writing of sexologists and to some degree psychoanalysts. It seems to me that kind of history –let’s call it popularisation, extension, vulgarization–does not give you a very good model for the history of normality. There is some of that, but one of the things that we found was that in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the US, the term normal started to be used in ways that had very little to do prima facie with the history we’d been working on. Part of our challenge was to ask, how can we bridge between a history of a scientifically self-conscious notion of the normal, however problematic that might seem to us today, and the kind of breezy assumptions that start to appear around the time of the Second World War, and especially in the US, that the normal is an ideal.

In an earlier period, Francis Galton was one of the people who wrote a lot about the normal and about its significance for the development of eugenics. A word he used as a synonym for normal was mediocre and for him, and indeed for his contemporaries, normal and mediocre were acceptable synonyms. When the normal becomes an ideal around 1950 you can no longer use mediocre as a synonym for it. Something important began to change, so there was a term that had a perfectly dignified scientific existence, albeit a narrow one, that broke out, but as it broke out it changed its significance and meaning. It continued to have some of the significance of the scientific connotations, but it was also given a whole range of new meanings and a capacity to be used for exhortation of people. It became something that people wanted to be. Before that it seems normal was just a place on the scale. There were good things about being normal, but to be normal was to be approximately healthy in physiological terms. It was no ideal, it only became an ideal in that later modern context.

HHS: In tracing the discursive history of a concept how do you go about disentangling it from terms with which it is often conflated including the average, the ideal or the typical?

PC: I don’t know whether we ever did properly disentangle them. What we did was find thematic threads and tried to show the genealogy of each of those. But we had to recognize that, in practice, they didn’t always function separately. That was one of the ironies.

Fenneke Sysling’s paper led me into an area I hadn’t worked on before – phrenology – which struck me as interesting because it occupied a space somewhere between respectable science and something more folksy, related to commercial popular activities of various kinds. What Sysling’s work shows is that something which belonged to one of the most serious areas of 19th century science, which was averages, were used in an impressionistic way in phrenology when people were given evaluations which they paid for. They then got numbers that came out showing particular qualities in relation to averages. One of the things that she found is that it happened very seldom that people would be found to have average measures of a particular quality. If you paid for knowledge then you came away with better numbers.

One of my sisters works in education and she’s done a study into how the notion of the average is used in expensive private schools in Australia. If you pay significant amount of fees it’s part of the implicit contract that your child will not have average results, but that leads to statistical nonsense because if nearly everybody in the school is above average then it leads to a kind of inflation of the average. The average keeps moving up and Fenneke found a similar pattern in 20th century commercial popular medicine. It’s an invitation to us to regard the average as a remarkably fluid notion, despite what mathematicians might want to say about it.

HHS: Your own essay in the issue also discusses phrenology, exploring how it ‘occupied an intermediate position between science and commerce’ – what light can an analysis of commerical activity shed on the history of scientific knowledge-making?

PC: I think this is a very hard question. The best that I could manage is to say what we find in practice when there are people who are professionals in hat-making who claim generalizable knowledge based on mensuration. At the same time there are others in the field of phrenology – and also a little later, but more strenuously and more assertively in the field of anthropometry – saying we measure people’s heads and measuring people’s heads is an important way of building scientific knowledge. It seemed to me interesting to see that phrenologists, and especially phrenologists in Scotland, were open to the idea that hatters knew things about head sizes that were in a sense, confirmatory of phrenological claims about general patterns in the population.

But in France where the Paris anthropological society was led by a very hard-headed scientist called Paul Broca there was a determined resistance to the idea that commercial hat-makers might be able to produce data of value to craniometric science. There were all these people around the society who thought there was interesting stuff going on in the area of hat-making that could be used as valuable evidence and that shouldn’t be ignored. But the hard-headed scientists were embarrassed because they wanted to keep their craniometry free of what they saw as individualistic measurement. Broca thought that a given hatter could measure people’s heads, but in science these measurements have to be repeatable when they’re done by different people in different laboratories. The measuring had to be done in a particular way to produce scientific knowledge. Scientific anthropologists wanted contributions and wanted support from the general public, but they didn’t value the ways in which those contributions were typically produced. They were actually stuck between their desire to be open and welcoming, on the one hand, and their embarrassment at the fact that these kinds of measures were not in their view scientifically worthy, on the other. They were trying to police the boundaries of science, but were having some difficult moments while doing it.

HHS: You identify sexology and psychoanalysis as ‘fields in which the concept of normality underwent decisive change at the turn of the 20th century’ – in what ways did the concept shift?

PC: When you do serious historical work you find out sometimes that the assumptions with which you began were wrong. We shared a strong assumption, which reflected our broad training in Continental critical theory. We supposed that so much of the thinking that was involved in conceptualising the normal could be thought about in terms of binaries, so if we talked about the normal we would expect to find that the normal and the abnormal were cognate. We assumed that as the notion of the normal arose historically in particular places that the notion of the abnormal would have arisen alongside it. It was quite a remarkable thing for us that this was not how it happened. People talked about the normal in medical contexts but they had no notion of the abnormal. They talked about the anomalous but that did not mean the same thing.

We were able to show that the notion of the abnormal emerges in the late 19th century as a term that has a particular function in psychiatry and in sexology, which is maybe 60 or 70 years after the notion of the normal emerges in medical writing. We thought that was highly significant and worth talking about. Birgit Lang addresses this in her contribution to the special issue. She particularly has something to say about the other point that emerges at that time through psychoanalysis, which is that Freud initiates a rethink of the whole notion of normality in such a way that it can’t be neatly opposed to abnormality. Normality itself is something mobile, something of an artefact. The notion that normality might be stable is one that Freud has no sympathy for and helps to undermine. Her paper asks what it was like for people to experience themselves as psychologically abnormal in their everyday lives. This introduces the contradiction between a broad normal activity and a kind of local normality which brings a richness that we had pointed at but not fully explored.

HHS: In her closing essay Elizabeth Stephens writes ‘the idea of the normal functions not only as a standard but also as a system, one that continues to operate even when its meaning and processes are conceptually opposed or incoherent’ – what does it mean to understand the normal as a system?

PC: When you work together with someone you each make all kinds of contributions but sometimes the other person turns up one day and has a really nifty way of putting something and you realize you owe them a great debt. I’m not saying Elizabeth doesn’t also owe me great debts, but I owe her the great debt of this insight.

There are quite a few colleagues, for example in the area of queer studies, who are convinced that the idea of the normal is riddled with contradictions and that you just have to push in some places to dismantle it or make it crumble. We were also sympathetic to this view but became convinced through our work that yes, it’s full of contradictions, but it actually flourishes on those contradictions because it means it’s able to defend itself in different ways against different kinds of attacks. The hope that it will crumble if you just press on it seems to us to be a forlorn one. We think that it’s much more sagacious to say that the normal is a very resilient notion and its resilience is sustained by the fact that it’s got these contradictory elements in it.

Someone might have noted in an analysis of Donald Trump that his success was based on the management of contradictions in his thinking and not just on some central lack of intelligence or lack of perception. Something much more interesting, complex and tricky is at work. We think that you can talk about the normal in the ways in which it holds the ideal, the typical and the average together. The normal has proven itself, no more so than in the last year, to be a remarkably powerful and resilient notion.

HHS: This leads in nicely to my final question: what is the status of the normal today?

PC: Normal became the keyword of 2020. It was one of the most used words in all kinds of popular contexts. We didn’t predict that and, indeed, we wouldn’t have wanted to because it was the pandemic that made it so. But I think there are some things in our history that suggest how that might have come about. In medical terms, the normal stands over against the pathological. When the pathological is so widespread and so threatening it’s quite obvious that the normal comes to be revalued. Instead of just being some tawdry failure to be impressive, the normal becomes something to be longed for because it takes us out of the space of pathological disorder. In current references the normal is spoken of as something to get back to, to return to. There is an attempt to retrieve a moment in the past.

One of the other great success adjectives in the pandemic is ‘unprecedented’. The notion that we’re living in a time which is unprecedented is, I think, accompanied by nostalgia to get back to a time when we just had some nice sensible precedented things around and we didn’t have the horror of the unprecedented. The novel and the unprecedented, which are things that we attempted to give some history of, then become very directly connected to the pathological. The normal appears to people as the hope for a world without novel viruses and without unprecedented moments. We didn’t write that whole history, but the history we’ve written does give you some things to stand on if you want to think and talk about the present moment.

In the end we realised, you can’t just make the normal into the name of everything hateful and everything that’s to be avoided, scorned or deconstructed. There are things about the normal that are enabling and that are functional and that we can’t and shouldn’t reject. We ended up being thoroughly ambivalent about those things. We didn’t think the things that we began with were mistaken, but we realized how much work the normal could do. We didn’t cease to believe the normal was constructed, inhibiting or trivializing but we saw the richness of it. Initially we thought we would just demolish it but we found stuff that we didn’t know we were going to find. We didn’t just start with some clever theory and demonstrate that is was true, regardless of what evidence we ran into, and I think that’s a good thing.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

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.