Bending Over Backwards

"Bending Over Backwardsis a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start."--The Minnesota Review "Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians.Bending Over Backwardsremains 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 "Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues."--Novel "It is crucial, if at times uncomfortable, reading for medical professionals and scholars in the medical humanities alike. . . . Daring to mix the literary and the medical, the symbolic and the instrumental, the interpretive and the interventionist, Davis demonstrates what disability can teach us about the life that awaits any human baby."--Literature and Medicine "This superlative book is highly recommended for undergraduates, scholars, and researchers in the fields of disability studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ethics, and cultural studies."--Choice "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, inChicago Tribune 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 Backwardsreexamines 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 Backwardsargues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.