Bending Over Backwards: Essays on Disability and the Body
Lennard J. Davis
(Author)
Michael Bérubé
(Foreword by)
21,000+ Reviews
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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.Product Details
Price
$32.20
Publisher
New York University Press
Publish Date
September 01, 2002
Pages
200
Dimensions
6.36 X 8.98 X 0.56 inches | 0.66 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780814719503
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Become an affiliateAbout the Author
Lennard J. Davis is professor in the Departments of English, Disability and Human Development, and Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of The Disability Studies Reader, among other books.
Michael Berube is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he is also director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. His six books include What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education and Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. He writes frequently for many national publications and hosts the blog www.michaelberube.com.
Reviews
"Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians. Bending Over Backwards remains an important and useful work for historians as a template for examining the myriad ways disability and Deafness infiltrate vital aspects of our identity, including laws, cultural icons, literature, and citizenship."--H-Net Reviews
"Lennard Davis is history in the making; for he is one of the foremost proponents of "disability studies," the newest theoretical kid on the block, noteworthy in part because it brings together scholars from the humanities and the medical sciences."--Stanley Fish "Chicago Tribune "
"Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues."--Novel
"[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collection's strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read."--American Journal of Occupational Therapy
"Bending Over Backwards is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start."--The Minnesota Review
"Lennard Davis is history in the making; for he is one of the foremost proponents of "disability studies," the newest theoretical kid on the block, noteworthy in part because it brings together scholars from the humanities and the medical sciences."--Stanley Fish "Chicago Tribune "
"Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues."--Novel
"[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collection's strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read."--American Journal of Occupational Therapy
"Bending Over Backwards is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start."--The Minnesota Review