Lennard J Davis

Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body

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 Normalcysurveys the emergence of a cluster of con...

The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era

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 contin...

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

The first significant book on the history and impact of the ADA—the “eyes on the prize” 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 ...

The Disability Studies Reader

The Disability Studies Reader collects, for the first time, representative texts from the newly emerging field of disability studies. This volume represents a major advance in presenting the most important writings about disability with an emphasis on those writers working from a materialist and pos...

Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection examines disability from a theoretical perspective. Each chapter challenges dominant biological, individualistic and psychological views of disability, drawing on one or two theories (and theorists) to advance a sustained analysis of disability, impai...

Obsession: A History

We live in an age of obsession. Not only are we hopelessly devoted to our work, strangely addicted to our favorite television shows, and desperately impassioned about our cars, we admire obsession in others: we demand that lovers be infatuated with one another in films, we respond to the passion of ...

My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness (Creative Nonfiction Series)

He remembers lying awake at night, every muscle rigidly alert, listening for intruders. He remembers frantically hammering on the door while his mother's oblivious footsteps passed back and forth inside. He remembers acting as a go-between in the marketplace, the doctor's office, the parent-teacher ...

Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions

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 ...

Left Politics and the Literary Profession

Left Politics and the Literary Profession

My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood With Deafness

The Disability Studies Reader

The Disability Studies Reader

Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions

The Sonnets

The Sonnets

Lennard J. Davis

Lennard J. Davis, a nationally and internationally known American specialist in disability studies, is Distinguished Professor of English at the University ...