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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The second edition of "The Disability Studies Reader" builds and improves upon the classic first edition, which has sold well over 6000 copies since 1999. As a field, disability studies burst onto the scene across the social sciences and humanities in the 1990s, and the first edition of the reader gathered the best work that had been written on the subject, including essays by famous authors such as Susan Sontag and Erving Goffman. The new edition is more global in its coverage and adds material on genetic testing, the human genome, queer studies, and issues in developing countries. The size of the audience has grown since the first edition's publication, and the second edition's new material will make it even more useful for courses on the subject. Courses on the subject have mushroomed in the past ten years, and can now be found across the social sciences, humanities, and behavioral sciences.