The Disability Studies Reader

Front Cover
Lennard J. Davis
Taylor & Francis, 2006 - Political Science - 451 pages
The second edition of "The Disability Studies Reader" builds and improves upon the classic first edition, which has sold well over 6000 copies since 1999. As a field, disability studies burst onto the scene across the social sciences and humanities in the 1990s, and the first edition of the reader gathered the best work that had been written on the subject, including essays by famous authors such as Susan Sontag and Erving Goffman. The new edition is more global in its coverage and adds material on genetic testing, the human genome, queer studies, and issues in developing countries. The size of the audience has grown since the first edition's publication, and the second edition's new material will make it even more useful for courses on the subject. Courses on the subject have mushroomed in the past ten years, and can now be found across the social sciences, humanities, and behavioral sciences.
 

Contents

The Bell Curve the Novel and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century
3
Chapter 2 Deaf and Dumb in Ancient Greece1
17
The Metaphorical Construction of Deafness in the Nineteenth Century
33
Chapter 4 The Other Arms Race
49
Disability Textuality and the Human Genome Project
67
The Politics of Disability
77
Chapter 6 Construction of Deafness
79
Who Should and Who Should Not Inhabit the World?
93
Chapter 21 Integrating Disability Transforming Feminist Theory
257
A Modest Proposal
275
The Politics of Race Gender and Emotional Distress in Meri NaniAma Danquahs Willow Weep for Me
283
Chapter 24 Compulsory AbleBodiedness and QueerDisabled Existence
301
James Gillingham Aimee Mullins and Matthew Barney
309
Chapter 26 Interlude 1 On Almost Passing
321
A Different Center
331
Psychiatry and Disability Activism
339

Chapter 8 Disability Rights and Selective Abortion
105
The Work of Diability in an Age of Globalization
117
Stigma and Illness
129
Chapter 10 Selections from Stigma
131
An Enigma Demystified
141
Chapter 12 AIDS and Its Metaphors
153
Theorizing Disability
159
Chapter 13 Reassigning Meaning
161
From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body
173
Foucault Power and the Subject Impairment
185
Chapter 16 The Social Model of Disability
197
Chapter 17 Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor
205
An Overview
217
The Question of Identity
229
On Disability as an Unstable Category
231
Chapter 20 Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability
243
Disability and Culture
353
Sign Language and Literary Theory
355
Chapter 30 The Enfreakment of Photography
367
Chapter 31 Blindness and Art
379
An Eye Witness Account
391
Chapter 33 Disability Life Narrative and Representation
399
Fiction Memoir and Poetry
403
Chapter 34 Helen and Frida
405
Chapter 35 Poems
411
Chapter 36 Poems
413
Chapter 37 Selections from The Cry of the Gull
417
Contributors
435
index
441
Back cover
453
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

Lennard J. Davis is Professor of English, Disability Studies, and Medical Education at the University of Illionis at Chicago. His is author of, among other books, Enforcing Normalcy and Bending Over Backwards.

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