Introduction: The Abnormality

Abstract

This introduction presents a special issue dedicated to the critical and interdisciplinary analysis of the notion of abnormality. We begin by distinguishing two fundamental dimensions of abnormality: a descriptive one, linked to statistical regularities or what is habitual, and a prescriptive one, related to what is valued, correct or appropriate. From this standpoint, we examine how various phenomena ¾such as madness, illness, disability and sexual dissidence¾ challenge and destabilize the norms that structure the dimensions of abnormality. The dossier is organized around three main approaches. First, a phenomenological perspective that understands abnormality as a rupture in bodily familiarity or habituality and in the subjects’s meaningful relation to the world, highlighting the role of the body and intersubjectivity in the constitution of the normativity. Second, a vitalist-normativist approach, inspired by Canguilhem, that conceives as an instance capable of generating its own norms and reinterpreting illness as the expression of new normative configurations. Finally, a constructivist approach that analyzes abnormality as the effect of historical and social processes of normalization, which produce “appropriate” types of subjects and establish forms of social exclusion. The dossier is organized around three main themes: philosophical, ethnographic, and literary. Across fourteen contributions, the authors explore the conceptual foundations of abnormality, the situated experience of illness, and the symbolic representations of health, disease, and disorder. Taken together, the dossier advances a complex understanding of the anomalous, deepening a critical field from which to rethink human relations, power dynamics, and well-being.