World building and the normate figure

Eugenic world building depends on the imagined cultural figure I have termed the normate (Garland-Thomson, 1997). Both the cultural image and the human version of the normate embody the form, function, behaviors, and appearances that conform to all of the culturally valued traits in the social systems of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability. The normate is medically and socially hypernormal, displaying the markers of that status and collecting resources and status from this embodied form of social capital. The term normate,^ I suggest, usefully designates the social figure [through] which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings^ (8). So narrow, however, is the range of traits that marks normate status that only a minority of actual people^ qualify (8). In the 1960s, sociologist Erving Goffman gave shape to the normate by showing how actual people fell short of its standards. There is, Goffman wryly writes, only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports^ (1963, 128). Goffman's work in sociology suggests the way bodies seemingly naturally carry social capital in flesh, comportment, behavior, appearance, position, and history along with the shame that the image of the normate invokes from those who feel they deviate from this phantom majority figure. The image of the normate that Goffman lays out is, to use Paul K. Longmore's phrase, severely able-bodied^ (GarlandThomson 2005, 33). As rare and unattainable as complete^ normate status is, such a character nevertheless has great cultural influence. We all recognize this figure; many of us aspire to achieve it; few attain it. Normate status is more aspirational than realized. Actual people seldom fully qualify as normates and, when they do, fall quickly from its fulfillment. Those who for a brief moment in time and space can conform to the normate’s static image assume the authority and wield the power that normate status grants until the human condition inevitably revokes it. The normate figure serves the work of eugenic world building in several ways. First, it provides the bodily template of the ideal citizen, the imagined definitive person for whom the built environment is designed. Architecture and designers have traditionally focused on aesthetics rather than the actual use of buildings, thus tacitly assuming that the occupants of these spaces and the users of these products are normates (Hamraie 2012). The development of universal design — in response to disability rights legislation and the emergence of feminist architectural criticism — offers an explicit critique of the implied normate user as an exclusionary concept. The more recent emergence of user-based design or what might be called diversity of access architecture and design has attended to how human physiological variation determines the ways in which the built environment is used and, thus, who it admits and who it excludes. Second, the normate figure underwrites eugenic world building in the broad, influential modern project of medical normalization.6 The figure of the normate hovers behind the newborn citizen as an imagined potentiality. The promise of a newborn is that it will become a normate — that it will carry out an expected future enabled by normate embodiment. The largely unquestioned concept of beginning life as a "healthy baby^ anchors the projected normate future understood as a right of citizenship...Undervalued or stigmatized human variations understood broadly as disabilities or disadvantages are identified and marked for eugenic elimination...What is suppressed in the fictional future of the normate...is the inherent contingency of human embodiment as it moves through time and space in the journey we call life.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson