But what if you are ‘normal’ – sound of mind and hale of heart, standing there on your own two feet looking at this page with your naked eye, independent and sovereign over skin and meat and bone – and what if everyone important in your life is normal too? How do these power-knowledge networks affect you? The answer this book suggests is that the power-knowledge networks that produce and regulate disability also produce and regulate ability, ableness, normality. The practices and institutions that divide, for example, the ‘able-bodied’, ‘sane’, and ‘whole’ from the ‘mentally ill’ and ‘deficient’ create the conditions under which all of us live; they structure the situation within which each one of us comes to terms with ourselves and creates a way of life. Normality has a history, a set of investments, an entire array of supports and assumptions that bring it into being, sustain it, and alter it when conditions so demand.”

- Ladelle McWhorter’s Foreword to Foucault and the Government of Disability.