Search results for ""author peter cryle""
The University of Chicago Press Normality: A Critical Genealogy
The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does and doesn't mean to be normal.
£31.00
Rowman & Littlefield Sexuality at the Fin de Siècle: The Making of a 'Central Problem'
It has come to be widely accepted that 'sexuality' as we know it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, around the time that Havelock Ellis declared it the 'central problem of life.' Yet however self-evident Ellis's claim about sexuality might seem, the act of placing something at the center is the consequence of insistent cultural work that engages with competing views about bodies and indeed about the 'life' of society. This volume explores how habits of thinking about the centrality of sex were articulated, how they engaged with pre-existing approaches to personal identity, and what competing discourses had to be displaced in order for sexuality to become as central as sexologists claimed it was. It shows that asserting the centrality of sexuality is not an innocent gesture, but one deeply implicated in a wide range of representations, practices, and experiences connected to discourses about race, gender, and other vectors of difference.
£93.07
