CHED Public Seminar: ‘The Object of Normality: Composite Statues of the Statistically Average American Man and Woman, 1890-1945’
Event Details
- Date:
- Thursday, 05 March 2015
- Time:
- 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
- Room:
- CCCS Seminar Room, Level 4
- Location:
- Forgan Smith Tower
- UQ Location:
- Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://www.ched.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=219022&pid=170139
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Mrs Emma Linnell
- Phone:
- 69492
- Email:
- e.linnell@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- History of European Discourses
Event Description
- Full Description:
- This seminar examines three sets of composite statues, made between 1890 and 1945, taking these as representative moments in the history of normality in the first half of the twentieth century. Composite statues were modeled using the statistical averages of large anthropometric data sets. The first example was commissioned by Dudley Allen Sargent for the 1893 World Fair in Chicago, modeled on the detailed charts he had collected as Director of Physical Education at Harvard. He called these the “Typical American Male and Female”. The second statue was “the Average Young American Male,” made in 1921 by Jane Davenport for the Second International Congress on Eugenics. This was modeled on her father’s vast collection First World War soldiers’ anthropometric records. The final example was the pair of statues made by the gynaecologist Robert Latou Dickinson in 1945, in collaboration with the artist Abram Belskie, and which were called “Norma” and “Normman.”
These three sets of composite statues exemplify three different ways of understanding the statistically average body in the early twentieth century: as typical, as average, and as normal. This paper will examine these composite statues as way to understand the specificity of these three terms, and the differences between them. While composite statuary might seem to have played a very minor role in early twentieth century scientific cultures, then, their popularity in sites of public exhibition did much to extend the widespread application of anthropometrics and statistics at this time. Through an analysis of this history, the paper will identify the specificity of the popular concept of normality that arises in the American mid-century and would soon become so ubiquitous.
Elizabeth Stephens is the Director of Research in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. Her publications include the books Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body, from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool UP, 2011; paperback 2013) and Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet's Fiction (Palgrave 2009). She is currently completing a new book, A Critical Genealogy of Normality, with Peter Cryle.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
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- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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