"Why be happy when you could be normal?" On ordinariness and people with learning disabilities
“Why be happy when you could be normal?” On ordinariness and people with learning disabilities The question is the title of Jeanette Winterson’s brilliant, fiercely honest account of her childhood (covering in unvarnished form similar terrain to “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit”) and some of its consequences for her throughout her life. The question is put to her as a teenager by her adoptive mother, and for me encapsulates neatly some of the central dilemmas faced by people with learning disabilities in relation to ‘ordinary living’. For people with learning disabilities, ordinariness has been a consistent rallying call, at least since the early days of ‘normalisation’ and the institutional closure movement. What ‘ordinariness’ means, it seems to me, has often been defined in opposition to the segregated and often institutionalised lives that people with learning disabilities all too often (still) find themselves living. So ordinary living is often described as living in an ordinary ho...