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The Social Construction of Normality*
Abstract
Our rapidly changing culture raises questions about standards of normality that social workers are often asked to help enforce. The author insists that we need standards to guide our communal life while also reminding the reader that normality is a mere contextdependent social construct. The article gives examples of drastically changing standards such as the changing expectations of normal sexuality or normal child rearing. Therapeutic standards, partially laid down in the Code of Ethics, are, moreover, the guidelines for social work practice, given the close interface between ethical values and clinical practice. The ambiguity of the meaning of normal and abnormal is discussed, suggesting that abnormal behavior may be required in the face of social injustices.
IN THIS ERA OF MOMENTOUS CHANGES in all areas of living, the concept of normality is forever being newly constructed and reconstructed. It behooves us to participate in this important process given that the activities of our social work profession have always been focused around moral and ethical values. It has thus become one of our most urgent tasks to examine together the concept of normality on which many of our professional activities are implicitly based, and which is the guidelines for our work. The concept of normality is also of interest because it involves the ambiguity of linguistic meanings.
A Postmodern Stance
I have called this article "The Social Construction of Normality" to emphasize the postmodern stance that informs my thinking -- namely that our social and to some extent our physical reality is humanly constructed. Such a stance implies that there are many possible realities based on many possible truths (Rosen & Kuehlwein, 1996). I hope to elaborate that normality is a value-based concept; that it heavily depends on the sociopolitical economic context including the historical moment; that it is culture specific; and that there is no normality outside a particular context.
Changing Standards
The idea for the subject of this article was triggered by a friend worrying that his twenty-year-old daughter had still not had any sexual relations. He did not use the word virgin, showing that female sexual relations have become transformed from a loss - in this case loss of virginity - to a gain...