Davis - The Disability Studies Reader

The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Readers tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.

Lennard J. Davis is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Departments of Disability and Human Development, English, and Medical Education. 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; Obsession: A History, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era.

The fifth edition of Lennard Davis The Disability Studies Reader adds a range of new essays on topics from disability and work to disability and sexual abuse. It remains the gold standard to teach your introductory course on disability studies or as the perfect supplement to a medical humanities course to provide materials on disability and culture.

Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences; Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University, USA

What is disability? What is disability studies? The first edition of The Disability Studies Reader played a foundational role in leading beginning students and advanced scholars to these questions. The newest edition of this canonical anthology, the best one yet, offers an ideal selection of texts through which to explore how both the field and the concept of disability itself are being reconsidered, resisted, extended and reclaimed.

Susan Schweik, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Disability experiences are diverse, nuanced and deeply political. As scholars, advocates and policy-makers, we need to think more and better and this volume is the best place to start.

Tom Shakespeare, Professor of Disability Research, University of East Anglia, UK

The Disability Studies Reader remains the indispensable volume for all scholars and students working in the interdisciplinary field of disability studies. The new edition continues a solid tradition of providing readers with foundational essays in the field, even as it opens out onto the most exciting new work centering disability and social justice, insisting on the centrality of race to a critical disability studies, or locating disability in a global context.

Robert McRuer, Professor of English, George Washington University, USA; author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability

The Disability Studies Reader provides critical information for scholars of the field. The thoughtful essays in this text explore the ways in which disability intersects with law, technology, medicine, education, and the world of media. Lennard Davis guides readers through our disability history with fascinating insights and surprising information. This is an excellent book through which to understand disability in todays increasingly interdependent world.

Haben Girma, Global Accessibility Leader

Fifth Edition

Lennard J. Davis

Fifth edition published 2017
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First edition published by Routledge 1997
Fourth edition published by Routledge 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Davis, Lennard J., 1949- editor.
Title: The disability studies reader / [edited by] Lennard J. Davis.
Description: Fifth edition. | New York, NY: Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016013306 | ISBN 9781138930230 (pbk.) |
ISBN 9781315680668 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: People with disabilities. | Sociology of disability. | Disability studies.
Classification: LCC HV1568 .D5696 2016 | DDC 362.4dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013306

ISBN: 978-1-138-93022-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-93023-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68066-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Utopia
by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Brixham, UK

LENNARD J. DAVIS

This essay lays out how normality came to hold powerful sway over the way we think about the mind and body. Calling on scholars and students to rethink the disabled body so as to open up alternative readings of culture and power, Davis signals the critical approach to this Reader in general while discussing historical and social perspectives in particular.

DOUGLAS C. 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: womens suffrage, African American freedom, and the restriction of immigration.

PAUL K. 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.

JAY DOLMAGE

As many as 40 percent of current Americans can trace their ancestry to Ellis Island, a place that Jay Dolmage asks us to consider as a rhetorical space. Dolmage argues that the policies and practices at Ellis Island created new and influential ways of seeing the body and categorizing deviations.

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.

MICHAEL BRUB

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?