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chapman, 2023, empire of normality

written 20240206.

provides a history of “normality” as a concept that formed and mutated with changing social structures and hierarchies. robert chapman argues that normality is not an objective measure; rather, it has served to reify emergent or existing hierarchies in ability, social class, gender and race. this book then traces the history of this concept, from adolphe quetelet’s nineteenth century statistical “average man, through francis galton’s development of eugenics, and through the rise of postindustrial capitalism.

if there is a consistent thread through these different historical manifestations of normality, it is the notion that it is possible to define and measure a physical or mental norm for the population, from which individuals may deviate to greater or lesser degress. for the eugenics movement, which also commited to the idea that the species could be improved at the population level, the endpoint was mass sterilisation and murder of people considered inferior. but chapman demonstrates that, even if societies have outwardly disavowed eugenics since the second world war, we are still organised around a “pathology paradigm” that ranks individuals in terms of their mental and physical functioning against a statistical norm.

chapman argues that in the context of twenty-first century capitalism, this paradigm is used in the construction of the neurotypical and neurodivergent populations, alternately for labour exploitation, or as a non-working surplus from which profits may yet be extracted. this parallels (and explicitly cites) the arguments developed in adler-bolton and vierkant’s health communis m, and comes to the same conclusion: the interests of the working class and the surplus are th e same.

to this end, while the book highlights the recent wins of the neurodiversity movement, it argues that neurodivergent liberation is not possible to achieve within capitalism. accordingly in the final chapter of the book, chapman signposts potential practices for a neurodivergent marxism, including neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergent workers and the wider organi sation of the surplus as surplus alongside the working class (again, mirroring health commun ism), building on existing practices within health politics and scientific research, and decol onising neurodivesity theory.