The End of Normal?

Prominent cultural critics Lennard J. Davis (2013) and J. Jack Halberstam (2012/13) have both recently argued that “we” are witnessing “the end of normal.” After twenty-five years living with the Americans with Disabilities Act and nearly fifty years living with the identity politics that gave rise to the social movements that forged modern civil rights legislation in the U.S., Davis has argued that “it is no longer useful to think of a person’s particular race, gender, sexual orientation, or choice as ‘normal,’” while Halberstam’s work analyzes the ways in which “the transformative political and societal shifts of recent decades… have paved the way for revolutionary conceptualizations of gender and marriage… [and ushered in] a new era that embraces sexual fluidity.” In this AHA roundtable discussion, I will explore the very valuable ideas presented by Davis and Halberstam while simultaneously offering a critical materialist disability studies analysis that I argue can inform our reading of both works in different and complementary ways.