Axes of Distinction

As I mentioned in class yesterday, what most snagged my interest in “Thinking about Surgically Shaping Children” was its focus on “making people normal” (or “better than normal”). I’m more interested in challenging the concept of normal (or @ least reducing its power by redefining it from “the ideal” to “the average”). I’ve been helped a lot in this thinking by the work of Michael Warner; you might want to get a taste of way of handling this material by looking @ a review, in Salon, of The Trouble with Normal.

Because of this particular angle of vision, I found myself less interested, in our exercise yesterday, in the actual patterns we made with our post-it notes than I was in our various rationales/justifications/axes for decision-making. These are the ones I recorded (please add to the list if I missed any, or if others have since occurred to you…)

• how permanent the procedure is (less permanent=okay; more permanent=less so)
• whether the procedure is “necessary” or not (a problematic term!)
• the amount of personal choice involved (whether one has the ability to consent to the procedure,
  or has it imposed on onself)
• the amount of pain involved
• the ratio of pain to “pay-off”
• whether the choice is operating on the individual or the societal level
• what personal experiences one has had with the procedure
• whether it is “natural” or not (another problematic term!)
• whehter it is medically “necessary” or not (ditto)
• how common it is
• how affordable it is (economics came surprisingly late into the conversation….)