The Trouble With Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality.

By Mary Louise Adams (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. viii plus 224pp. $50.00 cloth $19.95/paper).

For Mary Louise Adams, in her fascinating study of post-war sexual ideology among Canada's youth "the trouble with normal is its taken-for grantedness and is power as a regulatory sexual category." (p. 3) "Normal" in Adams work is the discourse of heterosexuality in the 1950s when the "difference between definitions of normal (heterosexual) and abnormal (homosexual) sexuality operated as a profound space of social marginalization and exclusion." (p. 2)

Adams hence contributes to a growing number of works that examine heterosexuality from the outside as a "dominant cultural discourse." (p. 19) Taking her lead from the doyen of these historians, gay pioneer scholar Jonathan Ned Katz, she sees heterosexuality not as "biologically 'natural' or socially self-evident" (p. 11) but as socially constructed in binary opposition to the concept of homosexuality. Following Michel Foucault, she sees sexuality as an idea that is "constantly being reproduced, negotiated, and subverted." Sexual discourses are "conduits through which power gains access to human bodies and where it is expressed by them at the most fundamental level." (p. 12) To cite Foucault: "Power seeps into the very grain of individuals, reaches right into their bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work with other people." (p. 13) Above all, power works through the process of "normalization" that produces "subjects who are 'normal', who live 'normality', and, most importantly, find it hard to imagine anything different." (p. 13) This works as a kind of "deviance-prevention mechanism. Individuals are encouraged, through a variety of discursive and institutional practices, to meet normative standards, and they come to desire the rewards that meeting those standards makes possible." (p. 13) Adams is therefore interested in the normalization process as "moral regulation", the disciplinary power that Foucault has described, notably in Discipline and Punish. But she, interestingly, explains how this disciplining process unfolds with the help of historical sociologists, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, who have argued that "moral regulation works by limiting the forms of expression available to us." "Fears of punishment or of not fitting in, can inhibit (their) ability to express (themselves) in a manner of (their) own choosing," notes Adams, "It's in this most insidious way that moral regulation limits the number of acceptable or possible social identities that we can take on." (p. 15) In other words, "moral regulation" prevents us from being what we'd like to be and from doing what we'd like to do. Oh, dear...

Having set her stall out so fluently, Adams embarks on a forceful empirical validation of her theoretical position. Following Elaine May's work on the US, Adams sees marriage and the family in the 1950s as the "only legitimate site for sex" (p. 32): wedlock was the ultimate aim for all youth. In an important insight, she notes that in post-war Canada, youth "came to symbolize what was 'good' and what was 'bad' about the modern world." (p. 51) This was reflected in the moral panic over juvenile delinquency. Two major sources of social anxiety - youth and sex - came to be entwined in the lengthy discourse about the sexualization of youth that was central to the debate over delinquency (p. 52): "the fear of being labelled delinquent was an effective form of self-regulation, a threat to those who might transgress sexual or moral standards." (p. 82) Hence a barrage of sexual advice aimed at teens valorized heterosexuality and demonized homosexuality. Gender and sexuality demanded a proper fit: girls and boys should be turning into real men and real women and not sissies and tomboys. Abnormality extracted a "terrible price": "ostracism, incarceration or psychiatrization." (p. 106) This discourse was reflected, too, in school sex education and in strongly-enforced obscenity laws that set clear boundaries of normal and abnormal. A discussion of Frederic Wertham's 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent is especially good, particularly material on the "moral panic" over Batman: "like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together." (p 168)

Adams hold on this complex material is assured, her writing is clear and her argument is stimulating. Indeed, The Trouble with Normal is one of the best-realized academic books I have read in a long time. Adams does what she sets out to do marvelously. This does not mean, however, that there are not significant questions that are raised by her approach. According to Adams, "What makes normalization such an effective exercise of power is the way it operates at the level of the individual, the way, as Foucault says, it uses its subjects." Citing Julian Henriques, Adams notes that "norms form the 'conditions of [our] desire'" Crucially, "the point is not that we simply try to meet social norms, it's that we WANT to." (p. 13) The implication is that we are actually duped into desiring: heterosexuality is, therefore, false consciousness.

This is, to say the least, open to debate. Common sense surely tells us that, even in an era of what Anthony Giddens has called "plastic sexuality" when reproduction could be divorced from heterosexuality because of better birth control, the procreative imperative must have been the major explanation why most women and men felt heterosexual desire.(1) This desire didn't just seem natural: it was natural; it is natural. There was no duping involved.

Adams has excellently demonstrated the heterosexual/homosexual binary in Canadian society, especially in Toronto, in the 1950s. But how valuable is the duality? She makes it clear that its major drawback was that it "limited possibility in peoples' lives, certainly it limited the forms of sexual expression." (p. 31) She regrets this "restriction of possibility in peoples' lives" (p. 169); and she is pleased that "this episode in the history of heterosexuality was not a particularly long one" and is happy that "(heterosexuality's) grip over the population as a whole has diminished somewhat recently." (apparently) (p. 171) As is currently fashionable, she openly defends a gay rights position which she links to her scholarship. Yet the heterosexual/homosexual binary must surely be of limited worth given that recent British and American studies have shown that gay practices are much rarer than previously thought: only 2% of American men have had sex with a man in the past year, and just over 1% of British men.(2) The trouble with Adams' book is, therefore, her over-reliance on the wishful thinking of that "gangster of love" Michel Foucault.

Adams rails at current nostalgia for the 1950s, those good old days of "traditional families and stable marriages." (p. 171) But I think a more compelling interpretation of the 1950s may be possible than that offered by the heterosexual/homosexual binary. For most North Americans and Britons, the 1950s seem a simpler time before the women's movement's shift to anti-humanism. More than this, the decade was a "golden age" before the pill from 1961 took much of the risk and excitement out of sex by removing at last the ancient, necessary connection between sex and reproduction; hence making the sexual revolution possible. As Elaine May and others have shown, limitations and controls abounded. Yet as John Modell has argued, young people in the 1950s still enjoyed great freedom with each other.(3) Therefore, it follows that, be one straight or gay, in the 1950s the subtle negotiation between freedom and restriction that is essential for a truly fulfilling and emotionally intense and enduring erotic life were last best balanced before the "anything goes" 1960s ethos took hold.

Adams' work therefore raises important questions about the scholarly approach to sex history, now hegemonic, that she represents so superbly. But her study of the discourse of normality in Canada in the 1950s is unlikely to be bettered by studies of the discourse elsewhere; therefore, her book will be of interest to scholars of both American and British, as well as Canadian, history.

University of Sussex

ENDNOTES

1. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy (London, 1992)

2. Kaye Wellings et al., Sexual Behaviour in Britain (Harmondsworth, 1994)186: John H. Gagnon et al., Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (Chicago, 1994) 175.

3. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (Chicago, 1998) John Modell, Into One's Own: From Youth to Adulthood in America 1925-1975 (Berkeley, 1989)