Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

A CULTURAL HISTORY 31
modern world. Normal both describes and prescribes, according to the
philosopher Ian Hacking: “The normal stands indifferently for what is
typical, the unenthusiastic objective average, but it also stands for what
has been, good health, and what shall be, our chosen destiny. That is why
the . . . word ‘normal’ has become one of the most powerful ideological
tools of the twentieth century” (Hacking 1990, 169). 13 And normality, as
Lennard Davis (1995) tells us, is enforced. It is the destination to which
we all hasten and the stick used to drive us there. We are obliged to act,
feel, look, and be normal—at almost any cost. The exacting requirement
to achieve the norm—from clothes and cars to faces and bodies—creates
enormous commercial markets that fuel consumer capitalism. Abnormal
costs as well. One goal of medical science is to cordon off the pathological
from the normal. 14 The pathological shores up the normal, which is “the
centre from which deviation departs,” according to Hacking (1990, 164).
People who deviate from formal, functional, or behavioral norms lose the
advantages of being normal. In this way, the label abnormal reduces people’s
economic and social status and relegates them to the outer edges of
the human community (figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1. Satire of the Hottentot Venus (Saartjie Baartman). Aaron Martinet
(1762–1841) and Louis François Charon (1783–1831). September 1815.
© The Trustees of the British Museum.