Overview

This text re-examines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal system, the history of science and medicine, eugenics and genetics. Throughout, he maintains that disability is the central category of postmodernity because it redefines the body in relation to concepts of normalcy which underlie the very foundations of democracy and humanistic ideas about the body. Davis argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender and sexual orientation.

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9780814719497

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Lennard Davis is history in the making; for he is one of the foremost proponents of disability studies, the newest theoretical kid on the block, noteworthy in part because it brings together scholars from the humanities and the medical sciences. --, in Chicago Tribune - Stanley Fish, in Chicago Tribune

<p> Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues.

Author Information

Lennard J. Davis is head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is also Professor of Disability and Human Development. His books include Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body and The Disability Studies Reader. Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University. In 2012, he served as the President of the Modern Language Association. He is the author of several books, including Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (NYU Press, 1997), The Left at War (NYU Press, 2009), What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “ Bias” in Higher Education (2006), and Life as We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996).

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