The PULSE Network for Medical and Health Humanities meets the European University Institute
The aim of this workshop is to bring together historians to investigate how notions of normality, sanity and health have been constructed, enforced, and contested across history, from the early modern period to contemporary history. Echoing the famous poster of the Dutch organisation Pandora at the height of the 1970s counter-psychiatry movement - Ever met anyone normal? And… did you like it? - we invite participants to interrogate the obviousness of the normal and to reveal its historical origins across both European and non-European contexts.
Over the past few decades, fields such as Disability Studies, Gender Studies, Mad Studies, and Crip Studies have emerged and flourished. These interdisciplinary areas critically examine normative assumptions about health, productivity, and personhood, often from positions outside normative able-bodiedness, able-mindedness, or the heterosexual matrix.
This workshop seeks to add a historical perspective to these areas of study. Building on recent historical scholarship that flips the script on mental illness, disorder, disability, and gender binarism, we ask: What has it meant, in different social, cultural, and political contexts, to be considered healthy, sane, fit, straight, able, but also smart, stable, competent, productive? How do these normative concepts relate to each other, how have their boundaries been drawn and policed, and by whom? What institutions, forms of expertise, and social practices have sustained these categories? And how have individuals and communities contested them, whether by resisting, subverting, demanding inclusion, or creating new norms? By historicising notions of normality, sanity, and health, we aim to denaturalise them, revealing their contingency, instability, and embeddedness in power relations.
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