The Disability Studies Reader

by Lennard J. Davis (Editor)

Overview

Disability studies has gone from being a relatively unknown field to one of increasing importance in the social sciences. The sixth edition of The Disability Studies Reader brings in new topics, scholars, writers, artists, and essays to address links between ableism and imperialism; disability bioethics; and the relationship between disability agency, social policy, and decarceration.

There are as many meanings and experiences of disability as there are disabled people, and this diversity ensures that the work of the field will continue to evolve. Fully revised and brought up to date, this volume addresses a wider range of geographical and cultural contexts, and many pay specific attention to the intersections between disability and race, gender, and sexuality. The growing interest and activism around the issue of neuroatypicality is also reflected in a new section on neurodivergence.

The Disability Studies Reader remains an excellent touchstone for students in disability studies courses across the disciplines, including the social sciences, English literature, and psychology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367536107
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Edition description:	6th ed.
Pages:	568
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lennard J. Davis is Professor of English, Disability and Human Development, and Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the sole editor of the Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture.

Rebecca Sanchez is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, where she teaches disability studies, transatlantic modernism, and poetics.

Alexander Luft is a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He served as a contributing editor to Beginning With Disability: A Primer.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Preface to the Second Edition     xiii
Introduction     xv
Historical Perspectives
Constructing Normalcy; The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century   Lennard J. Davis     3
Deaf and Dumb in Ancient Greece   M. Lynn Rose     17
"A Silent Exile on This Earth": The Metaphorical Construction of Deafness in the Nineteenth Century   Douglas Baynton     33
The Other Arms Race   David Serlin     49
(Re)Writing the Genetic Body-Text: Disability, Textuality, and the Human Genome Project   James C. Wilson     67
The Politics of Disability
Construction of Deafness   Harlan Lane     79
Abortion and Disability: Who Should and Who Should Not Inhabit the World?   Ruth Hubbard     93
Disability Rights and Selective Abortion   Marsha Saxton     105
Universal Design; The Work of Disability in an Age of Globalization   Michael Davidson     117
Stigma and Illness
Selections from Stigma   Erving Goffman     131
Stigma: An Enigma Demystified   Lerita M. Coleman     141
Aids and Its Metaphors   Susan Sontag     153
TheorizingDisability
Reassigning Meaning   Simi Linton     161
Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body   Tobin Siebers     173
On the Government of Disability: Foucault, Power, and the Subject of Impairment   Shelley Tremain     185
The Social Model of Disability   Tom Shakespeare     197
Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor   David Mitchell   Sharon Snyder     205
The Dimensions of Disability Oppression: An Overview   James I. Charlton     217
The Question of Identity
The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category   Lennard J. Davis     231
Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability   Susan Wendell     243
Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory   Rosemarie Garland-Thomson     257
Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal   Chris Bell     275
"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     283
Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence   Robert McRuer     301
The Vulnerable Articulate: James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney   Marquard Smith     309
Interlude 1: On (Almost) Passing   Brenda Brueggeman     321
Deaf People: A Different Center   Carol Padden   Tom Humphries     331
A Mad Fight: Psychiatry and Disability Activism   Bradley Lewis     339
Disability and Culture
Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space, and the Body: Sign Language and Literary Theory   H-Dirksen L. Bauman     355
The Enfreakment of Photography   David Hevey     367
Blindness and Art   Nicholas Mirzoeff     379
Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eye Witness Account   Georgina Kleege     391
Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation   G. Thomas Couser     399
Fiction, Memoir, and Poetry
Helen and Frida   Anne Finger     405
Poems   Cheryl Marie Wade     411
Poems   Kenny Fries     413
Selections from The Cry of the Gull   Emmanuelle Laborit     417
Contributors     435
Index     441

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Lennard Davis’s Disability Studies Reader has been a must-use for years in my courses on disability studies and medical humanities. The newest edition provides further proof of its importance for the classroom. Yet more wide ranging and global, it provides not only solid historical essays but think-pieces about disabilities in the modern world. It is in many ways a course in a box.—Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University

With the inclusion and integration of the humanities in medical education, every edition of The Disability Studies Reader has been crucial in developing curricular "interventions" that introduce students to the fluid construction of normalcy, the common representations of disability, and the ethical, moral, and political issues associated with accepted diagnostic and clinical practices. The essays on mental health/mental illness, pre-natal genetic screening, chronic illness and gender, race and depression, and cognitive disorders in this fourth edition will enable teachers like myself to offer medical students other ways of thinking, seeing and relating to their future patients. — Therese Jones,. Director, Arts and Humanities in Healthcare Program. University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Editor, Journal of Medical Humanities

With every new edition, Lennard Davis's Disability Studies Reader becomes more pertinent and more necessary. If you are wondering what disability studies is, start here.

- Tobin Siebers, Department of English, University of Michigan

As the interdisciplinary field of disability studies continues to transform our understandings of culture, history, and politics, The Disability Studies Reader remains the touchstone. The new edition pairs the indispensable essays that have founded the field with cutting-edge work in feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonial theory. This is one of the most important volumes in cultural studies available.

- Robert McRuer, English, George Washington University

No one serious about the subject can afford to be without the latest edition of the Disability Studies Reader on their shelf. From politics to poetry, memoir to theory, poster children to posthumans, it is the one indispensable guide to the field for student and scholar alike.

- Douglas Baynton, History, University of Iowa

Since its first appearance the Disability Studies Reader has always been an indispensible volume - but with the new, fourth edition this is even more the case. The new additions here - on intersections with sexuality, technology, the law, questions of the social, and the need to understand disability in global contexts - speak to the evolving ways in which disability works in the contemporary world. It is very rare that a single text can do justice to a highly complex subject, but this book does just that. It is the essential guide for scholars and students.

- Stuart Murray, Contemporary Literatures and Film Director, Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities

"This is an indispensable collection, bringing together foundational arguments in disability studies and provocative new work from emerging young scholars in the field. If you're curious as to why (and how) disability studies has stimulated so much debate in the humanities, The Disability Studies Reader is a great place to start finding out."
—Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, Penn State University

"There is simply no area of contemporary life— be it medical, economic, educational, juridical, athletic, architectural, culinary, recreation, entertainment—that goes unaddressed in the disability studies literature. Just when you thought that there was nothing new to say about social construction, difference, the performative, the universal, the particular and the body, disability studies comes along to demonstrate both the theoretical and practical urgencies to which these and other too often abstract terms really refer. If you've been hearing about disability studies, but didn't quite know what to make of it, this is the anthology for you."
—Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law, Florida International University

"A classic just got even better! Only a few disciplines can claim a founding text. For disability studies, with its far-reaching implications for other fields, this is it. It all starts—and re-starts in a superb second edition—right here."
—David B. Morris, author of The Culture of Pain

"This revised edition demonstrates the significant evolution of the field. Greater attention to such vital issues as globalization, gender, critical race studies, and cultural constructions appear in cogent new essays that enhance and complement the collection. As with the original Disability Studies Reader , this edition challenges its readers with pioneering studies of theoretical models and the politics of disability.
—Susan Burch, author of Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II

"This collection of scholarly essays strikes at the concept of normalcy and touches us on both personal and societal levels. From an academic perspective, the field of disability studies broadens our race, class, and gender discussions to include layers of identity and moments of connection. The Disability Studies Reader challenges us to reexamine human difference."
—I. King Jordan, President, Gallaudet University —This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

This timely new edition by Davis and Sanchez captures a number of established and, crucially, emerging perspectives in US disability studies. The text constitutes a new key reading for students and researchers alike.”

Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies and Education, University of Sheffield

“The 6th edition of this ever-evolving and student-friendly text demonstrates the fluidity, complexity, engagements, and energies of both the past and present critical study of disability. New sections on 'key ideas,' 'disability and social policy' and a focus section on 'neurodivergence'sparkle uniquely for this newest edition of what has always been a fundamental text in the field of Disability Studies (for 23 years, since 1997). Like all other editions before it, this one has thoughtful and provocative changes that also then illustrate the unfolding and expanding nature of critical work in our understandings and explorations—both current and historical—of disability and complex embodiment.”

Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Aetna Endowed Chair of Writing, University of Connecticut, Co-editor, Disability Studies Quarterly

“The addition for the first time of a co-editor, Deaf and disability studies scholar Rebecca Sanchez, marks the 6th edition as a truly new generation for The Disability Studies Reader. More BIPOC and activist authors, more interdisciplinary and global in scope—this is the edition you want to have on your shelf. A new opening section surveys key ideas in the field, making the Reader more teachable than ever and underscoring that disability studies has arrived.”

Mara Mills, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication and Co-director, NYU Center for Disability Studies

“The breadth and depth in this brand-new edition of The Disability Studies Reader offers foundational grounding for approaching the study of disability while at every turn insisting on disability’s imbrication with race, gender, sexuality, geopolitical movements, and socioeconomic class.”

Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Delaware

“Now in its 6th edition, The Disability Studies Reader is simultaneously viewed as a dynamic standard-bearer for the field of disability studies and a snapshot of what is happening in the field now. This edition, edited by Lennard Davis and new co-editor Rebecca Sanchez, continues the tradition. The inclusion of more contributions featuring intersectional analysis on disability and race, gender, sexuality, as well as chapters focusing on structural inequities, such as decarceration, makes this new edition a must for disability scholars and campus library collections. Additionally, the section focusing on neurodiversity is an especially compelling and excellent introduction to this area of disability studies for those who are less familiar with this topic. Most importantly, in this time of pandemic and social change, the 6th edition of The Disability Studies Reader functions as a helpful guide to those of us thinking about the future of disability studies education and advocacy.”

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Professor of Philosophy, Gallaudet University

From the Publisher