The Disability Studies Reader

Lennard J. Davis is Professor of Disability and Human Development, English, and Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of, among other works, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body; Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions; My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness; and Obsession: A History.

New articles noted with an astersisk*


Preface to the Fourth Edition





PART I: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES













Constructing Normalcy



Lennard J. Davis





Arguing that the concept of normalcy was invented during the nineteenth-century, this essay explores how both eugenic science and the literary structures of the novel emerged as ways to construct and promote the notion of the "average man."





　






Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History*



Douglas Baynton





Discusses how disability is used to justify discrimination against marginalized groups in America, surveying three great citizenship debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: women’s suffrage, African American freedom, and the restriction of immigration.









`Heaven’s Special Child’: The Making of Poster Children*



Paul Longmore





An examination of the history of telethons describing them as cultural mechanisms that display poster children to evoke sympathy and profit. While the child becomes a celebrity in the eyes of the public, he or she also can be construed as an exploited spectacle.





　






Disabling Attitudes: U.S. Disability Law and the ADA Amendments Act*



Elizabeth Emens





A consideration of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the more recent ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA in which definitions of disability and impairment narrowed with the ADA and broadened with the ADAAA, The essay speculates on whether the broader vision of disability will survive in the court system. Considering social attitudes and connections between the private and public spheres of American culture and politics, Emens predicts that the courts will ultimately create a narrower definition of disability.





PART II: THE POLITICS OF DISABILITY









Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism*



Clare Barker and Stuart Murray





An exploration of the intersections of two major critical fields-- Postcolonial Studies and Disability Studies, this essay discovers new approaches to literary and cultural criticism. Realizing that postcolonialism and disability are both tied to questions of power, Barker and Murray assert that Critical Disability Studies "needs to adapt its assumptions and methodologies to include and respond to postcolonial locations of disability".





　






Abortion and Disability: Who Should and Should Not Inhabit the World?"



Ruth Hubbard





This essay presents the problem of prenatal testing in relationship to disability and, while not opposing testing, raises concerns about the discrimination inherent in such interventions.





　






"Disability Rights and Selective Abortion"



Marsha Saxton





Saxton alerts readers to the possible conflict between the goals of the abortion rights movement and that of the disability rights movement, and she proposes goals for both that might bring their aspirations in line with one another.





　






Disability, Democracy, and the New Genetics*



Michael Berube





Does prenatal testing for genetic diseases fit in with our notions of democracy? Would it be in the interests of a democratic culture to promote or restrict the rights of parents to select the child they want, particularly when it comes to disability?









"A Mad Fight: Psychiatry and Disability Activism"



Bradley Lewis





Locates disability activism in the Mad Pride movement that fight for the rights of psychiatric survivors and consumers of mental health services.





　






The Institution Yet to Come: Analyzing Incarceration Through a Disability Lens" *



Liat Ben-Moshe





This essay analyzes the reality of incarceration through the prism of disability by comparing health institutions to prisons. Both structures house people plagued by psychiatric, intellectual, and physical disabilities, and both also produce either abolitionists, those who are against or escape the system, or Foucauldian docile bodies, those who conform to the system. She suggests the pressing need to expand notions of what comes to be classified as `incarceration’.





PART III: STIGMA AND ILLNESS









Stigma: An Enigma Demystified



Lerita M. Coleman-Brown





Examines Erving Goffman’s key concept of "stigma" from a disability studies perspective.





　






Unhealthy Disabled



Susan Wendell


Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. Wendell argues that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identifi cation of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and "cure" of disabilities.





　


PART IV: THEORIZING DISABILITY









"Reassigning Meaning"



Simi Linton





This essay analyzes how language can oppress people with disabilities by creating social, cultural and linguistic expectations and meanings for an ableist society.





　






"Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship



Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp





Anthropologists propose a new notion of kinship to see how cultures claim or reject disabled fetuses, newborns and young children.





　






Aesthetic Nervousness



Ato Quayson





Coining a new term—"aesthetic nervousness"—the Ghanaian scholar theorizes the crisis resulting from the inclusion of disability in literary or dramatic works.





　






The Social Model of Disability



Tom Shakespeare





A description of the social model and a criticism of some aspects of that paradigm.





　






Narrative Prosthesis



David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder





The authors develop the idea that narrative requires disability as an essential component of storytelling, particularly so the plot can fix or cure the impairment.





　






"The Unexceptional Schizophrenic: A Post-Postmodern Introduction Catherine Prendergast






Argues that postmodernism has failed to deconstruct the schizophrenic, keeping a monolithic view based on some canonical writings rather than seeing the schizophrenic as part of a new emerging group that is active, multivocal, and seeking to fight for their rights.





　






Deaf Studies in the 21st Century: Deaf-Gain and The Future of the Human*



H-Dirksen L. Baumann and Joseph J. Murray





This essay provides an overview of the field of Deaf Studies as it has emerged in the latter part of the 20th century, and then provides a new rhetorical frame for future directions that this field may take in the 21st century, the cultural attitude shifting from "hearing loss" to "Deaf-gain". "Deaf-Gain" provides a rationale for the positive side of sign language and the continuing existence of Deaf culture.





PART V: IDENTITIES AND INTERSECTIONALITIES









The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category



Lennard J. Davis





Argues that postmodern ideas of identity challenge the existent models in disability studies and argues that since disability is a shifting identity that newer paradigms are needed to explain it.









Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment—For Identity Politics in a New Register



Tobin Siebers





Using the ideas of post-positivist realism, Siebers argues that disability is a valid and actual identity as opposed to a deconstructive-driven model.





　






Defining Mental Disability*



Margaret Price





The contested boundaries between disability, illness, and mental illness are discussed in terms of mental disability. Ultimately, Price argues that higher education would benefit from practices that create a more accessible academic world for those who may have able bodies but disabled minds. The excerpt included here explores the confines of naming and defining Mental Disability, offering a biographical account of the author’s academic journey.





　






"Disability and Blackness"*



Josh Lukin





Lukin provides a short history of the intersection of blackness and disability, highlighting the experiences of Johnnie Lacy and Donald Galloway who were members of the Berkeley Center for Independent Living in the 1960s. The essay traces a theme of black involvement and yet exclusion from disability activism. It also moves into the current moment and follows some of the recent scholarship in the field.









My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming Out*



Ellen Samuels


This essay discusses the coming-out discourse in the context of a person whose physical appearance does not immediately signal a disability Considering the complicated dynamics inherent in the analogizing of social identities, the politics of visibility and invisibility, and focusing on two "invisible" identities of lesbian-femme and nonvisible disability, Samuels "queers" disability in order to develop new paradigms of identity, representation, and social interaction.









Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory



Rosemarie Garland-Tomson





This essay applies the insights of disability studies to feminist theory.









Unspeakable Offenses: Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Intersectionality*



Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear





Erevelles and Minear draw on narratives exemplifying the intersections between race, class, gender, and disability. Through the stories of Eleanor Bumpurs, Junius Wilson, and Cassie and Aliya Smith, the margins of multiple identity categories are placed at the forefront, outlining how and why individuals of categorical intersectionality are constituted as non-citizens and (no)bodies by the very social institutions (legal, educational, and rehabilitational) that are designed to protect, nurture, and empower them.





　






Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence



Robert McRuer





This essay points to the mutually reinforcing nature of heterosexuality and able-bodiedness, arguing that disability studies might benefit by adopting some of the strategies of queer theory.





　






The Cost of Getting Better: Ability and Debility*



Jasbir Puar





Puar argues for a deconstruction of what ability and disability mean and pushes for a broader politics of capacity and debility that puts duress on the seamless production of able bodies in relation to disability. Examining the recent "It Gets Better" campaign against queer youth suicide, Puar links suicide to forms of slow death, asking which bodies are able to capitalize on their vulnerabilities in neoliberalism and which are not.







　



　


PART VI: DISABILITY AND CULTURE





　






Cripping Heterosexuality, Queering Able-Bodiedness Murderball, Brokeback Mountain and the Contested Masculine Body



Cynthia Barounis





Using the two films as examples, the essay argues that disability in one is normalized by depicting disabled athletes as hyper-masculine while homosexuality in the other is invested with values of able-bodiedness.





　






Sculpting Body Ideals: Alison Lapper Pregnant and the Public Display of Disability



Ann Millett-Gallant





How does Alison Lapper’s monumental self-portrait statue of her pregnant, non-nomative, nude body fit into the history and culture of public art?





　






"When Black Women Start Going on Prozac…" The Politics of Race, Gender, and Emotional Distress in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah's Willow Weep for Me Anna Mollow










The Enfreakment of Photography



David Hevey









Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account



Georgina Kleege









Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation



Thomas G. Couser









Autism as Culture



Joseph N. Straus









Disability, Design and Branding: Rethinking Disability for the 21st Century* Elizabeth DePoy and Stephen Gilson






This essay presents an innovative way of thinking about disability as disjuncture and the significant role that design and branding play in creating this ill-fit. DePoy and Gilson assert that design and branding provide the contemporary opportunity and relevant strategies for rethinking disability and social change, healing notions of disjuncture in the postmodern and post-postmodern world of disability studies.





　


PART VII: FICTION, MEMOIR, AND POETRY









Stones in my Pockets, Stones in my Heart



Eli Clare





A memoir that explores the way the author’s disability, queer identity, and memories of childhood sexual abuse intersect with and thread though one another.









Unspeakable Conversations



Harriet McBryde Johnson





An account by the late disabled writer who meets and argues with utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, himself an advocate for withdrawing life support from severely disabled people.





　






Helen and Frida



Anne Finger





A dreamlike account of being disabled as a child and imagining a romantic movie starring Helen Keller and Frieda Kahlo.





　






"I am Not One of the" and "Cripple Lullaby"



Cheryl Marie Wade





Poems that explore issues of identity and self-definition from a disabled perspective.





　






"Beauty and Variations" by Kenny Fries






Poem that explores the nature and meanings of beauty.









Selections from Planet of the Blind



Steve Kuusisto





Memoir by the poet/writer of being a teenage boy with limited eyesight and an expansive imagination.





　






Selected Poems*







James Ferris





This selection includes twelve previously unpublished poems by distinguished poet and disability studies scholar.