Disability and Culture: The usefulness of Davis’ argument about the relationship between the concept of normalcy and cultural production

Disability and Culture: The usefulness of Davis’ argument about the relationship between the concept of normalcy and cultural production PDF Author: Leila Fielding
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656293562
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Book Description
Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Cultural Studies - Basics and Definitions, grade: 1:1 (First Class), , language: English, abstract: Disability is a natural part of the human condition. Almost everyone you cross paths with will possess some form of deviance from the socially enforced ideological norm, whether or not they choose to let this be apparent. Every person will, at some point, experience some form of impairment or disability during their lives; be it brought on by disease, depression, old age, injury or deterioration. “Disabilities are less the property of persons than they are moments in a cultural focus. Everyone in any culture is subject to being labelled and disabled.” Yet, despite the temporality of ability, disability is still marginalised, distorted and concealed within mainstream culture. Types and categories of disability are extensive, escalating and erratic. It is therefore absurd that society clings to the notion of normalcy like an anxious child clutching its mother’s hand. People are disabled by culture, as well as by society. Depending on how difference is perceived and acknowledged, people can be enabled or disabled by those around them. Disabilities are therefore manufactured by society and represented by culture.

Disability and Culture: The usefulness of Davis’ argument about the relationship between the concept of normalcy and cultural production

Disability and Culture: The usefulness of Davis’ argument about the relationship between the concept of normalcy and cultural production PDF Author: Leila Fielding
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656293562
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Book Description
Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Cultural Studies - Basics and Definitions, grade: 1:1 (First Class), , language: English, abstract: Disability is a natural part of the human condition. Almost everyone you cross paths with will possess some form of deviance from the socially enforced ideological norm, whether or not they choose to let this be apparent. Every person will, at some point, experience some form of impairment or disability during their lives; be it brought on by disease, depression, old age, injury or deterioration. “Disabilities are less the property of persons than they are moments in a cultural focus. Everyone in any culture is subject to being labelled and disabled.” Yet, despite the temporality of ability, disability is still marginalised, distorted and concealed within mainstream culture. Types and categories of disability are extensive, escalating and erratic. It is therefore absurd that society clings to the notion of normalcy like an anxious child clutching its mother’s hand. People are disabled by culture, as well as by society. Depending on how difference is perceived and acknowledged, people can be enabled or disabled by those around them. Disabilities are therefore manufactured by society and represented by culture.

Disability and Culture

Disability and Culture PDF Author: Leila Fielding
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783656294108
Category : Disability studies
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Cultural Studies - Basics and Definitions, grade: 1:1 (First Class), - (MMU, BA Hons), language: English, abstract: Disability is a natural part of the human condition. Almost everyone you cross paths with will possess some form of deviance from the socially enforced ideological norm, whether or not they choose to let this be apparent. Every person will, at some point, experience some form of impairment or disability during their lives; be it brought on by disease, depression, old age, injury or deterioration. "Disabilities are less the property of persons than they are moments in a cultural focus. Everyone in any culture is subject to being labelled and disabled." Yet, despite the temporality of ability, disability is still marginalised, distorted and concealed within mainstream culture. Types and categories of disability are extensive, escalating and erratic. It is therefore absurd that society clings to the notion of normalcy like an anxious child clutching its mother's hand. People are disabled by culture, as well as by society. Depending on how difference is perceived and acknowledged, people can be enabled or disabled by those around them. Disabilities are therefore manufactured by society and represented by culture.

Enforcing Normalcy

Enforcing Normalcy PDF Author: Lennard J. Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780014
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
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.

Normality and Disability

Normality and Disability PDF Author: Gerard Goggin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351400193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Hotly contested, normality remains a powerful, complex category in contemporary law and culture. What is little realized are the ways in which disability underpins and shapes the operation of norms and the power dynamics of normalization. This pioneering collection explores the place of law in political, social, scientific and biomedical developments relating to disability and other categories of ‘abnormality’. The contributors show how law produces cultural meanings, norms, representations, artefacts and expressions of disability, abnormality and normality, as well as how law responds to and is constituted by cultures of disability. The collection traverses a range of contemporary legal and political issues including human rights, mercy killing, reproductive technologies, hate crime, policing, immigration and disability housing. It also explores the impact and ongoing legacies of historical practices such as eugenics and deinstitutionalization. Of interest to a wide range of scholars working on normality and law, the book also creates an opening for critical scholars and activists engaged with other marginalized and denigrated categories, notably contesting institutional violence in the context of settler colonialism, neoliberalism and imperialism, to engage more richly and politically with disability. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Continuum journal.

The End of Normal

The End of Normal PDF Author: Lennard Davis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052020
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
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.

Culture - Theory - Disability

Culture - Theory - Disability PDF Author: Anne Waldschmidt
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839425336
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Which theoretical and methodological approaches of contemporary cultural criticism resonate within the field of disability studies? What can cultural studies gain by incorporating disability more fully into its toolbox for critical analysis? Culture - Theory - Disability features contributions by leading international cultural disability studies scholars which are complemented with a diverse range of responses from across the humanities spectrum. This essential volume encourages the problematization of disability in connection with critical theories of literary and cultural representation, aesthetics, politics, science and technology, sociology, and philosophy. It includes essays by Lennard J. Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Dan Goodley, Robert McRuer and Margrit Shildrick.

Bending Over Backwards

Bending Over Backwards PDF Author: Lennard J. Davis
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479820113
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
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 Backwards reexamines 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 Backwards argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age

A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age PDF Author: David T. Mitchell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350029319
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
If eugenics -- the science of eliminating kinds of undesirable human beings from the species record -- came to overdetermine the late 19th century in relation to disability, the 20th century may be best characterized as managing the repercussions for variable human populations. A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age provides an interdisciplinary overview of disability as an outpouring of professional, political, and representational efforts to fix, correct, eliminate, preserve, and even cultivate the value of crip bodies. This book pursues analyses of disability's deployment as a wellspring for an alternative ethics of living in and alongside the body different while simultaneously considering the varied social and material contexts of devalued human differences from World War I to the present. In short, this volume demonstrates that, in Ozymandias-like ways, the Western Project of the Human with its perpetuation of body-mind hierarchies lies crumbling in the deserts of failed empires, genocidal furies, and the rejuvenating myths of new nation states in the 20th century. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of history, literature, culture, philosophy, rehabilitation, technology, and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age explores such themes and topics as: atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health while wrestling with their status as unreliable predictors of what constitutes undesirable humanity.

The Disability Studies Reader

The Disability Studies Reader PDF Author: Lennard J. Davis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415630525
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
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.

The Disability Studies Reader

The Disability Studies Reader PDF Author: Lennard J. Davis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 131739786X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
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 Reader’s tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.