Lennard J. Davis's Books

The Disability Studies Reader

By: Lennard J. Davis

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The Fourth Edition of the Disability Studies Reader breaks new ground by emphasizing the global, transgender, homonational, and posthuman conceptions of disability. Including physical disabilities, but exploring issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities, this edition explores more varieties of bodily and mental experience. New histories of the legal, social, and cultural give a broader picture of disability than ever before. Now available for the first time in eBook format 978-0-203-07788-7.

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582

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Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

0415630525

ISBN 13

9780415630528

Enforcing Normalcy

Disability, Deafness, and the Body

By: Lennard J. Davis

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Enforcing Normalcy

Disability, Deafness, and the Body

By: Lennard J. Davis

In this highly original study of the cultural assumptions governing our conception of people with disabilities, Lennard J. Davis argues forcefully against “ableist” discourse and for a complete recasting of the category of disability itself. Enforcing Normalcy surveys the emergence of a cluster of concepts around the term “normal” as these matured in western Europe and the United States over the past 250 years. Linking such notions to the concurrent emergence of discourses about the nation, Davis shows how the modern nation-state constructed its identity on the backs not only of colonized subjects, but of its physically disabled minority. In a fascinating chapter on contemporary cultural theory, Davis explores the pitfalls of privileging the figure of sight in conceptualizing the nature of textuality. And in a treatment of nudes and fragmented bodies in Western art, he shows how the ideal of physical wholeness is both demanded and denied in the classical aesthetics of representation. Enforcing Normalcy redraws the boundaries of political and cultural discourse. By insisting that disability be added to the familiar triad of race, class and gender, the book challenges progressives to expand the limits of their thinking about human oppression.

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229

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Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1784780006

ISBN 13

9781784780005

Bending Over Backwards

Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions

By: Lennard J. Davis

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Bending Over Backwards

Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions

By: Lennard J. Davis

This text re-examines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. It argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself.

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214

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NYU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0814719503

ISBN 13

9780814719503

My Sense of Silence

Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness

By: Lennard J. Davis

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My Sense of Silence

Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness

By: Lennard J. Davis

Selected as an "Editors Choice" by the Chicago Tribune Lennard J. Davis grew up as the hearing child of deaf parents. In this candid, affecting, and often funny memoir, he recalls the joys and confusions of this special world, especially his complex and sometimes difficult relationships with his working-class Jewish immigrant parents. Gracefully slipping through memory, regret, longing, and redemption, My Sense of Silence is an eloquent remembrance of human ties and human failings.

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177

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University of Illinois Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0252090942

ISBN 13

9780252090943

The Disability Studies Reader

By: Lennard J. Davis

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The Disability Studies Reader

By: Lennard J. Davis

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582

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Routledge

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ISBN 10

0415630525

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9780415630528

The End of Normal

Identity in a Biocultural Era

By: Lennard Davis

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The End of Normal

Identity in a Biocultural Era

By: Lennard Davis

In an era when human lives are increasingly measured and weighed in relation to the medical and scientific, notions of what is “normal” have changed drastically. While it is no longer useful to think of a person’s particular race, gender, sexual orientation, or choice as “normal,” the concept continues to haunt us in other ways. In The End of Normal, Lennard J. Davis explores changing perceptions of body and mind in social, cultural, and political life as the twenty-first century unfolds. The book’s provocative essays mine the worlds of advertising, film, literature, and the visual arts as they consider issues of disability, depression, physician-assisted suicide, medical diagnosis, transgender, and other identities. Using contemporary discussions of biopower and biopolitics, Davis focuses on social and cultural production—particularly on issues around the different body and mind. The End of Normal seeks an analysis that works comfortably in the intersection between science, medicine, technology, and culture, and will appeal to those interested in cultural studies, bodily practices, disability, science and medical studies, feminist materialism, psychiatry, and psychology.

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169

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University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472052020

ISBN 13

9780472052028

Enforcing Normalcy

Disability, Deafness, and the Body

By: Lennard J. Davis

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Enforcing Normalcy

Disability, Deafness, and the Body

By: Lennard J. Davis

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229

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Verso Books

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ISBN 10

1784780006

ISBN 13

9781784780005

Resisting Novels (Routledge Revivals)

Ideology and Fiction

By: Lennard J. Davis

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Resisting Novels (Routledge Revivals)

Ideology and Fiction

By: Lennard J. Davis

By making friends with signs", Lennard Davis argues, "we are weakening the bond that anchors us to the social world, the world of action, and binding ourselves to the ideological." For the reader, this power of the novel needs to be resisted. But there is a double resistance at work: the novel is also a defensive structure positioning us against alienation and loneliness: the dehumanising symptoms of modern life. While discussions surrounding ideology in novels traditionally concentrate on thematics, in this study – first published in 1987 - Davis approaches the subject through such structural features as location, character, dialogue and plot. Drawing on a wide range of novels from the seventeenth century to the present day, and on psychoanalysis as well as philosophy, Resisting Novels explores how fiction works subliminally to resist change and to detach the reader from the world of lived experience. This controversial critique will engage students and academics with a particular interest in literary theory.

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237

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1317672224

ISBN 13

9781317672227

Bending Over Backwards

Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions

By: Lennard J. Davis

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Bending Over Backwards

Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions

By: Lennard J. Davis

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214

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NYU Press

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ISBN 10

0814719503

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9780814719503

Enabling Acts

The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights

By: Lennard J. Davis

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Enabling Acts

The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights

By: Lennard J. Davis

The first major behind-the-scenes account of the history, passage, and impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—the landmark moment for disability rights The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the widest-ranging and most comprehensive piece of civil rights legislation ever passed in the United States, and it has become the model for disability-based laws around the world. Yet the surprising story behind how the bill came to be is little known. In this riveting account, acclaimed disability scholar Lennard J. Davis delivers the first on-the-ground narrative of how a band of leftist Berkeley hippies managed to make an alliance with upper-crust, conservative Republicans to bring about a truly bipartisan bill. Based on extensive interviews with all the major players involved including legislators and activists, Davis recreates the dramatic tension of a story that is anything but a dry account of bills and speeches. Rather, it’s filled with one indefatigable character after another, culminating in explosive moments when the hidden army of the disability community stages scenes like the iconic “Capitol Crawl” or an event when students stormed Gallaudet University demanding a “Deaf President Now!” From inside the offices of newly formed disability groups to secret breakfast meetings surreptitiously held outside the White House grounds, here we meet countless unsung characters, including political heavyweights and disability advocates on the front lines. “You want to fight?” an angered Ted Kennedy would shout in an upstairs room at the Capitol while negotiating the final details of the ADA. Congressman Tony Coelho, whose parents once thought him to be possessed by the devil because of his epilepsy, later became the bill’s primary sponsor. There’s Justin Dart, adorned in disability power buttons and his signature cowboy hat, who took to the road canvassing 50 states, and people like Patrisha Wright, also known as “The General,” Arlene Myerson or “the brains,” “architect” Bob Funk, and visionary Mary Lou Breslin, who left the hippie highlands of the West to pursue equal rights in the marble halls of DC.

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313

Publisher

Beacon Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807059293

ISBN 13

9780807059296

My Sense of Silence

Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness

By: Lennard J. Davis

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My Sense of Silence

Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness

By: Lennard J. Davis

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177

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University of Illinois Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0252090942

ISBN 13

9780252090943

Poor Things

How Those with Money Depict Those without It

By: Lennard J. Davis

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Poor Things

How Those with Money Depict Those without It

By: Lennard J. Davis

For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things, Lennard J. Davis labels this genre “poornography”: distorted narratives of poverty written by and for the middle and upper classes. Davis shows how poornography creates harmful and dangerous stereotypes that build barriers to social justice and change. To remedy this, Davis argues, poor people should write realistic depictions of themselves, but because of representational inequality they cannot. Given the obstacles to the poor accessing the means of publication, Davis suggests that the work should, at least for now, be done by “transclass” writers who were once poor and who can accurately represent poverty without relying on stereotypes and clichés. Only then can the lived experience of poverty be more fully realized.

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210

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478059974

ISBN 13

9781478059974

Factual Fictions

The Origins of the English Novel

By: Lennard J. Davis

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Factual Fictions

The Origins of the English Novel

By: Lennard J. Davis

Nowadays, most readers take the intersection between fiction and fact for granted. We've developed a faculty for pretending that even the most bizarre literary inventions are, for the nonce, real. . . . The value of Davis's book is that it explores the h

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268

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812216105

ISBN 13

9780812216103

Enabling Acts

The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights

By: Lennard J. Davis

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Enabling Acts

The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights

By: Lennard J. Davis

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313

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Beacon Press

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ISBN 10

0807059293

ISBN 13

9780807059296

The End of Normal

Identity in a Biocultural Era

By: Lennard Davis

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The End of Normal

Identity in a Biocultural Era

By: Lennard Davis

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169

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University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472029657

ISBN 13

9780472029655

The Madwoman and the Blindman

Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability

By: David Bolt,Julia Miele Rodas,Elizabeth J. Donaldson

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The Madwoman and the Blindman

Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability

By: David Bolt,Julia Miele Rodas,Elizabeth J. Donaldson

This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability perspective provides fresh insight into Charlotte Bronte's classic novel from a vantage point that is of growing academic and cultural importance. Contributors include many of the preeminent disability scholars publishing today, including a foreword by Lennard J. Davis. Though an indisputable classic and a landmark text for critical voices from feminism to Marxism to postcolonialism, until now, Jane Eyre has never yet been fully explored from a disability perspective. Customarily, impairment in the novel has been read unproblematically as loss, an undesired deviance from a condition of regularity vital to stable closure of the marriage plot. In fact, the most visible aspects of disability in the novel have traditionally been understood in rather rudimentary symbolic terms - the blindness of Rochester and the "madness" of Bertha apparently standing in for other aspects of identity. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability, resists this traditional reading of disability in the novel. Informed by a variety of perspectives - cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies - the essays in this collection suggest surprising new interpretations, parsing the trope of the Blindman, investigating the embodiment of mental illness, and proposing an autistic identity for Jane Eyre. As the first volume of criticism dedicated to analyzing and theorizing the role of disability in a single literary text, The Madwoman and the Blindman is a model for how disability studies can open new conversation and critical thought within the literary canon.

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