ABSTRACT
According to Barry Schwartz, everything suffers from comparison. Rather than measuring human experience as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in absolute terms, ‘comparisons are the only meaningful benchmark’ (2004: 181). In many contexts, this proves generally unproblematic, but, as history testifies, physiological, sexual, gender, ethnic or religious benchmarking has served to exclude and oppress those who fail to fit within the privileged, ‘normal’ blueprint that comparison so often gives rise to. Of course, these are not selfevident or objective norms: as Georges Canguilhem comments in the context of physiology, the concept of norm ‘cannot be reduced to an objective concept determinable by scientific methods. Strictly speaking, then, there is no biological science of the normal’ (Canguilhem, 1991: 228). Yet despite the apparent ease by which the ‘normal’ elides with the ‘natural’, such norms arise neither ‘naturally’ nor ‘innocently’:
A norm is in effect the possibility of a reference only when it has been established or chosen as the expression of a preference and as the instrument of a will to substitute a satisfying state of affairs for a disappointing one. Every preference for a possible order is accompanied, most often implicitly, by the aversion for the opposite possible order. That which diverges from the preferable in a given area of evaluation is
not the indifferent but the repulsive or more exactly, the repulsed, the detestable.
