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By Root 863 0

” in order to get us in line with the current standard of health. And this is our permanent state until “at last [they] are sure [we’ve] been properly pilled” (Old). But we’re never properly pilled because they always seem to find new disorders and develop new pills for these new problems. Now, clearly, for some things like cancer this is true. Cancer is bad. But what about other areas of our life, areas with no obvious standard or clear better or best? What about mental health or sexuality? How sad is too sad? How happy is too happy? What spectrum do you fall under and where? Is your place on this new scale a disorder that needs to be fixed? Are we “fixing” you merely so you can function in a society you’ve been thrown into, a society that itself might be sick? Are you too creative, too hyper, too independent, or simply too spirited to be able to sit still for eight hours a day doing mundane tasks for no clear purpose? If so, it’s not your environment that’s out of whack, you’re the problem. But don’t fret. They’ll fix you right up. Dr. McMonkey McBean will diagnose your “disorder” and then he’ll throw handfuls of pills at you, pills produced by an industry that oddly enough had a hand in discovering, defining, and describing the very “disorder” you now seem to have. And this procedure will continue until you’re an adequately functional member of society, even if that means a dull and listless human being.

But what does it mean to be “functional” anyway? Do they just want you to behave within standard parameters so you can hold down your humdrum workaday job and life, or perhaps perform well at the standardized mind-numbing tasks that occupy the majority of the school day? Should this be the standard we live our lives by? There are so many questions and too many people ready to give us answers. Maybe it’s time we ask some questions: Who put you in charge? Why is your way the best?

Or consider sexuality. Now obviously Seuss didn’t deal with this issue in any of his books. I can only imagine the puns, word play, and menagerie that would attend a Seussian dialogue on sex and gender. But maybe that is how we ought to think about this topic. One thing Foucault is adamant to point out is that the very idea of gender and sex is a result of medicalizing human behavior. We diagnose you as straight or gay or bi. We demand that you categorize yourself, so we can prescribe the appropriate behaviors or condemnations. We figure out how you ought to behave, what is healthy, normal, and well adjusted. But gender is a construct. The idea that girls do one thing and boys another is so preposterous that its prevalence can only be explained as a mechanism of control reinforced and maintained because we refuse to stand up against it. As one scholar noted, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that creates this creature.”7 It’s not the case that all women are or need to be any particular way. The same goes for the rest of us. The world is populated by individuals. The group or categories we lump them into are often artificial creations that can and ought to be fought against. People are too different, too diverse to be categorized so simply as this or that gender. Such a simple construction is the result of simple minds, not evidence of a simple, ordered universe. So maybe a Seussian sex menagerie, as odd as it would be, would be enlightening and more a mirror of reality: ambiguously gendered creatures that float between and within categories, each its own unique being navigating a maze of roles and positions in order to merely be the kind of thing that it is, regardless of whether it can be easily compartmentalized. Girls who like girls, and boys who like boys, or girls who like boys who like girls who like toys.

An additional point Foucault makes with respect to sexuality is how our discourse on it controls it. We don’t control sex by not talking about it. Rather, we control sex and behavior