Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body

In this study of the history and contemporary significance of the cultural assumptions that govern our conception of people with disabilities, Lennard J. Davis argues that thinking the subject remains trapped inside the discourse of ableist ideology. Davis at once shows how our current notions about the physically disabled came into being, and argues for a whole new way of thinking about disability. The book surveys the emergence of a cluster of concepts of normalcy 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 chapter on contemporary cultural theory, the book explores the pitfalls of privileging the figure of sight in conceptualizing the nature of textuality. And in a treament of nudes and fragmented bodies in Western art, it shows how the ideal of physical wholeness is both demanded and denied in the classical aesthetics of representation. The book re-configures the boundaries of the conceptual universe, inserting disability into the familiar triad of race, class and gender, with results that can only be welcomed by progressives. Lennard J. Davis is the author of Factual Fictions and Resisting Novels.