2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel aims to show how sex came to be understood as normal or abnormal.  According to the OED, defining the normal as a type, rule or standard becomes common around 1840.  In the late nineteenth century the etymology gets more complicated, as medical discourse introduces a second—contradictory—meaning to refer to a person diagnosed as “free from any disorder,” mental or physical.  The emergence of a third meaning raises the epistemological stakes still further.  By the early twentieth century the educated elite in Europe and North America would use normal to designate a “heterosexual,” and before long all three meanings would drift haphazardly, and sometimes illogically, into the collective consciousness in ways largely unnoticed by historians of sexuality. 

Focusing on three key historical moments we track shifts in the cultural understanding of “normal sex” over about a century.  This approach allows us to anatomize the precise calibrations of the normal in relation to terms often seen as similar, including norm, normativity, heteronormativity, and normalization.  We propose also to highlight how this distinctive discursive formation competes with a plurality of residual regulatory systems such as morality or respectability.  Opening with a paper by Cryle and Stephens, we explore how the “normal” emerged in nineteenth-century scientific usage.  Doan then considers how the “natural” came to be normalized through the writings of early twentieth-century sexologists and sex reformers.  Finally, Minto shifts attention to the mid-twentieth century by investigating the “normal homosexual” in the context of 1970s transnational homophile politics.