Bending over Backwards : Essays on Disability and the Body

by Davis, Lennard J.

• ISBN13: 9780814719503
• ISBN10: 0814719503
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-08-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

With the advent of the human genome, cloning, stem-cell research and many other developments in the way we think of the body, disability studies provides an entirely new way of thinking about the body in its relation to politics, the environment, the legal system, and global economies.Bending Over Backwardsreexamines 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 prime 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.Bending Over Backwardsargues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Side Shows and Back Bends	vii
Michael Berube
Introduction People With Disability: They Are You	1	(8)
The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism	9	(24)
On Disability as an Unstable Category
Crips Strike Back	33	(14)
The Rise of Disability Studies
Dr. Johnson, Amelia, and the Discourse of Disability	47	(20)
Criminal Statements	67	(12)
Homosexuality and Textuality In the Account of Jan Svilt-Eighteenth-Century Shipwrecked Sailor
Who Put the the In the Novel?	79	(23)
Identity Politics and Disability in Novel Studies
The Rule of Normalcy	102	(17)
Politics and Disability in the U.S.A. [United States of Ability]
Bending Over Backwards	119	(26)
Narcissism, the Ada, and the Courts
Go to the Margins of the Class	145	(13)
Disability and Hate Crimes
A Voyage Out (Or is it Back?)	158	(7)
Class and Disability in My Life
Notes	165	(26)
Index	191	(10)
About the Author	201