This is a profound and unsettling question—one that goes to the heart of what Davis critiques in Constructing Normalcy. His argument is that the very idea of “normal” is not a neutral descriptor but a historically contingent construct, born from the rise of statistics, industrial capitalism, and eugenic thinking in the 19th century. Once the bell curve became a dominant metaphor for understanding human variation, it redefined the center as “normal” and everything else as deviation—abnormal, defective, pathological.

So when you ask whether we “eliminate the imperfect within,” you’re pointing to the internalization of these norms. And yes, Davis would likely argue that the logic of normalcy doesn’t just operate externally—through institutions like academia, employment, or medicine—but also internally, shaping how we perceive ourselves and others. We come to police our own bodies, thoughts, and behaviors against an imagined statistical ideal.

The Internalization of Normativity

In contemporary society, the demand to perform “normalcy” is pervasive:

• 📄 Academic papers often require a tone of disembodied objectivity, discouraging personal narrative or embodied knowledge—especially knowledge that emerges from disability, neurodivergence, or non-normative experience.

• 💼 Job interviews frequently reward those who can present themselves as “well-adjusted,” “resilient,” “productive,” and “team players”—all coded expectations that align with able-bodied, neurotypical, and culturally dominant norms.

• 🧠 Mental health discourse often frames distress or difference as something to be corrected or managed, rather than understood as part of a broader spectrum of human experience.

In this sense, “elimination” not always literal but symbolic and structural. It’s about erasure, silencing, and the demand for conformity. We’re taught to suppress the parts of ourselves that don’t fit the mold— even mere slowness, ambiguity, or contradiction.

A Culture of Optimization

This is exacerbated by neoliberal logics of self-optimization:

• The body becomes a project to be managed.

• The mind becomes a productivity tool.

• Identity becomes a brand.

In such a system, imperfection isn’t just stigmatized—it’s rendered economically and socially inefficient. And so we learn to curate ourselves, to “pass,” to hide the “defective” within.

But Davis’s work offers a powerful counter-narrative. It invites us to imagine a world not organized around the tyranny of the norm, but around access, interdependence, and the richness of variation.