The Oppressive Power of Normalcy in the Lives of Disabled Children: Deploying History to Denaturalize the Notion of the ‘Normal Child’

Abstract

This chapter draws on Lennard Davis’ influential work on the historical specificity of the notion of normalcy (1995), to denaturalise the contemporary Anglo-American notion of the ‘normal child’ (see also Foucault, 1991 [1977]). Following Davis, I argue that in order to comprehend the specificity of the contemporary disabled child’s experience of oppression, we require an understanding of the contemporary hegemonic notion of the ‘normal child’. In the context of race, Ruth Frankenberg (1993: 6) has observed that ‘[t]o speak of whiteness is […] to assign everyone a place in the relations of racism’. To problematize normalcy is thus to reframe ableism as an issue that concerns everyone.

[T]he ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person. (Davis, 1995: 24)