NP? The hegemony of "normality"

[Doug Millison]

Calling somebody insane is another way to dehumanize an Other.
Enjoy,
Doug


http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-11/10russell.cfm

ZNet Commentary
Madmen? November 11, 2001
By Marta Russell

Since the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings on September 11,
there have been numerous public outcries casting the terrorists and
suspects as disabled.

Former President Clinton as well as several pundits described the
terrorists as "madmen." One writer labeled the Taliban a "cult of ignorant
psychotics." Media pundits and government officials have called them
"insane" or "insane SOBs."

Some have used the term "sick people" to describe those who commit or
support such acts. While comparing the "two enemies of democracy" as the
Soviet communists and the Islamic peoples of the Middle East Former Israeli
Prime Minister Netenyahu on MSNBC (Sept. 20) described the Islamic belief
system as "pathological."

Others observed that the US policies have had a role in the strike against
the US, have critiqued the ruthless acts of the CIA by labeling CIA
operations as "insane."

Here I want to look at what is beneath the inaccurate and seemingly
off-hand casual way that society equates disablement with violence and
unwanted acts.

Each of these public figures and pundits have misused impairment and in
doing so are building negative public sentiment based on assumptions of
"normalcy." The men who flew into the WTC were not insane, they were not
mentally disabled nor were they diagnosed with any illness yet they are
being constructed that way. The terrorists are not insane no matter how we
may disagree with their acts.

Sane people commit murder every day. They fill the courts of our land.
Timothy McVeigh could also be called a terrorist, he was certainly a
murderer, yet he was not insane and he was not ill.

Workers at the CIA who are behind the "insane" acts against governments the
world over are not diagnosed with physical or mental illnesses either,
rather, they are carrying out institutional orders based on our
governmentís policies.

When society labels its enemies as "sick" and "psychotic" it is using the
language in an inaccurate way. As an acquaintance of mine who has
depression writes "I have several friends with psychotic symptoms, stemming
from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, schizoid affective disorder, and even
in one or two cases from 'simple' clinical depression. Not one of them is
in the least violent.

(Even as a medical term, "psychotic" as a description of a _person_ as
opposed to a person' _symptoms_ is seriously misleading.) They talk quite
rationally of the voices they hear, and what the voices usually tell them
is "you are worthless," so while voices can trigger suicide they very
rarely trigger violence against others.

Those who are actually sick (and not "sick") are well aware of their
illness, suffer from it, and strive to control it."

He poignantly makes it clear that the greatest "deficiency" of the vast
majority of those who have schizophrenia is a deficiency of money. Many
could manage their illness if they were not nearly penniless, disability
pay and other income supplements being "criminally low."

So if people with such conditions (I think we would all agree) should be
cared for compassionately and provided with appropriate medical care and
supports why are they being framed as the culprits responsible for Sept.
11? Why is there such a clamor to make the terrorists and other societal
acts of violence appear to be the outcome of having an impairment?

For one, those society identifies as "abnormal" have traditionally inspired
fears of moral collapse. Intellectual impairment, for instance, has often
wrongly been linked to criminal deviance. I want to make it clear that such
thinking is eugenic in its origin.

Psychology or psychiatry which defines the "normal" then calculates who
doesn't fit that norm creates a division of "normal and abnormal." Such
societal division can be traced back to eugenic thinking which groups
disabled persons with the "unfit.".

One example -- Karl Pearson a leader in the eugenicist movement who headed
the Department of Applied Statistics in London, defined "unfit" as "the
habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculocous, the insane,
the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or from
excess" (cited in Kevles, 1985, p. 33)

Society has created a harmful association between disability and criminal
activity, mental incompetence and other conditions. The conflation of
disability with depravity expressed itself in the formulation of a
"defective class." (see L. Davis, "Constructing Normalcy" in The Disability
Studies Reader)

Such correlations were used against immigrants as well. Charles Davenport,
an American eugenicist connected to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, thought
the influx of European immigrants would make the American population
"darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature...more given to crimes of
larceny, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality." (cited in Kevles, p.
48)

And such thinking infiltrated the left. Emma Goldman, socialist and also a
eugenicist, wrote that unless birth control was encouraged, the state would
"legally encourage the increase of paupers, syphilitics, epileptics,
dipsomaniacs, cripples, criminals, and degenerate" (Kevles 1985, p. 90)

This is no critique of capitalism, it simply reinforced survival of the
fittest social darwinist thinking and justified the social exclusion of
these groups -- essentially letting capitalists off the hook to providing a
just economy that would accommodate all. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew
Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell were all saying the same thing as Goldman.

Societies continue to produce these ideas. James Watson, winner of a Nobel
Prize for his work in genetics, still spews this kind of deterministic
biology. Watson has linked disability to criminal proclivity and suggested
to prospective parents that they should use genetic engineering to weed
disabled persons out of society:

"The truly relevant question for most families is whether an obvious good
to them will come from having a child with a major handicap. Is it more
likely for such children to fall behind in society or will they through
such affliction develop the strengths of character and fortitude that lead,
like Jeffrey Tate, the noted British conductor, to the head of their
packs?" ......

"But we perhaps most realistically should see it [handicap] as the major
origin of asocial behavior that has among its many bad consequences the
breeding of criminal violence."

[...]
The 19th century construction of the "norm" is one of the most dangerous
notions that the disability movement has had to confront. Here we must
confront the conditioned use of such thought.

For instance, another associate wrote "What you [those labeling terrorists
as insane] are really trying to do is to be as insulting as possible toward
the perpetrators of the WTC disaster, and to say that they are really evil
and you really hate them.

[...]  The easy way out is for "norms" to use polarized conceptions of
normal and abnormal, sane and insane, healthy and sick in order to demean
and make the objects of public scorn subhuman. Well, then it is OK, is it
not, to carpet bomb them or in the case of actual disabled persons
segregate, institutionalize, or "put them out of their misery."

I object to the use of "insane," "psychotic," and "sick" in the public
language to describe the violence and hatred unleashed in the past weeks
because it fosters the idea that disabled people are a social problem; in
our instance, even a menace to society. Secondly, such labeling is
reactionary and offers little direction for political action.

In fact, to use individual mental/emotional/physical capacities as an
explanation for terrorism or state sponsored atrocities depoliticizes what
we are experiencing. It completely removes any possibility of
historical/materialist analysis.

The hegemony of "normality" is a bourgeois construct and we must recognize
it as such.


-- Marta Russell author, Los Angeles, CA http://disweb.org/ Beyond Ramps:
Disability at the End of the Social Contract
http://www.commoncouragepress.com/russell_ramps.html