A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

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Our everyday lives are the expression, in their taken-for-grantedness, as well as (in
popular culture) their self-consciousness, of our capacity to hold a line against the
generalised anxiety and the threat of chaos that is a sine qua non of social life. In this
sense everyday life is a continuous achievement (Silverstone, 1999:165).
But while the regularity of everyday life and the distraction provided by absorption in its
trivial details may offer comfort and security, it does not offer an escape from alienation.
Normality, like the bourgeois individualism Henri Lefebvre writes of:
implies the dreary, ludicrous repetition of individuals who are curiously similar in
their way of being themselves and of keeping themselves to themselves, in their
speech, their gestures, their everyday habits (Lefebvre, 2008:152).
To cite Fromm again, whereas the normal person is pleased to be her own individual, the
things that she thinks and says are very often just the same things that everyone else is
thinking and saying:
We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and „common
sense‟, which are so powerful because of our readiness to conform to the
expectations that everyone has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of
being different (Fromm, 2001:91).
Being normal involves a process of learning to want to act in the ways that society requires
one to act. This is not to say that normality is experienced as being either totally pleasurable
or completely alienating. For most people it contains elements of both: a sense of well-being
as well as a limitation of possibilities. As Brian Longhurst notes, people find extraordinary
pleasures in their ordinary lives as well as mundanity and restriction. They enjoy their
ordinary lives as well as hating parts of them (Longhurst, 2007:20). While there may exist a
sense that things are not all they should or could be, there is at the same time a reluctance to
give up the security that normality offers.
Impairment as inferiority
That impairment and disability are regarded in terms of inferiority can be identified in the
cultural dominance of the medical or individual model of disability, expressed in the World
Health Organisation‟s 1981 International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and
Handicaps (ICIDH). This makes the following distinctions: