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Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America by Anna Creadick (Paperback, 2010)

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At the end of World War II, many Americans longed for a return to a more normal way of life after decades of depression and war. In fact, between 1945 and 1963 the idea of normality circulated as a keyword in almost every aspect of American culture. But what did this term really mean? What were its parameters? Whom did it propose to include and exclude? In Perfectly Average, Anna Creadick investigates how and why normality reemerged as a potent homogenizing category in postwar America. Working with scientific studies, material culture, literary texts, film, fashion, and the mass media, she charts the pursuit of the normal through thematic chapters on the body, character, class, sexuality, and community. Creadick examines such evidence as the Norm and Norma models produced during the war by sexologists and anthropologists--statistical composites of normal American bodies. In 1945, as thousands of Ohio women signed up for a Norma Look-Alike contest, a Harvard Study of Normal Men sought to define the typical American male according to specific criteria, from body shape to upbringing to blood pressure. By the early 1950s, the man in the gray flannel suit had come to symbolize what some regarded as the stultifying sameness of the normal-ized middle class. Meanwhile, novels such as From Here to Eternity and Peyton Place both supported and challenged normative ideas about gender, race, and sexuality, even as they worked to critique the postwar culture of surveillance--watching and being watched--through which normalizing power functioned. As efforts to define normality became increasingly personal, the tensions em-bedded in its binary logic multiplied: Was normal descriptive of an average or prescriptive of an ideal? In the end, Creadick shows, a variety of statistics, assumptions, and aspirations converged to recast normality not as something innate or inborn, but rather as a quality to be actively pursued--a standard at once highly seductive and impossible to achieve because it required becoming perfectly average.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
University of Massachusetts Press
ISBN-13
9781558498068
eBay Product ID (ePID)
93349796

Product Key Features

Author
Anna Creadick
Publication Name
Perfectly Average: the Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Subject
History
Publication Year
2010
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
240 Pages

Dimensions

Item Weight
325g

Additional Product Features

Title_Author
Anna Creadick
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States

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Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America by Anna Creadick (Paperback, 2010)

Best-selling in Adult Learning & University

Secrets Of Mental Math: The Mathemagician's Guide to Lightening Calculation and Amazing Maths Tricks by Arthur Benjamin, Michael Shermer (Paperback, 2006)

The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality by John Hamer (Paperback, 2013)

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss, Tahl Raz (Paperback, 2017)

The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness by Morgan Housel (Paperback, 2020)

Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins (Paperback, 2021)

Code of Practice for In-service Inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment by The Institution of Engineering and Technology (Paperback, 2020)

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C Gibson (Paperback, 2015)

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