Enforcing Normalcy
Download Enforcing Normalcy PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Enforcing Normalcy book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Enforcing Normalcy
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.
Enforcing Normalcy
This book proposes that instead of seeing disabilities as impairments, we consider the ways that criticism can change and expand when we allow for included disabled critical moments.
A Transformatory Ethic of Inclusion
Inclusion, is a topical notion which underpins contemporary human service practices and policies within Western Judeo-Christian societies. Inclusion is most often considered within socio-historical and socio-political contexts, whereby technical and legislative responses are sought. However, this book explores the question, "How ethically defensible is the notion of inclusion in relation to people with intellectual disability?" The book contends that inclusion is a multifaceted, complex concept in a dualistic and dichotomous relationship with exclusion. It is argued that historical and contemporary conceptualisations of exclusion for people with intellectual disability have been constructed from various philosophical and theological matrices imbued with particular values about personhood. Furthermore, it is proposed that the ethical significance of inclusion and exclusion in the context of intellectual disability is defined and perpetuated by expressions of a particular socio-symbolic order underpinned by patriarchy and kyriarchy, and subjected to two controlling ethics - an Ethic of Normalcy and an Ethic of Anomaly. Inclusion and exclusion are conceived as phenomena relating to how membership is defined, legitimated, or repelled by concealed, occluding boundaries acting within a patriarchal socio-ethical fabric. The book argues that Ethical Inclusion is only possible through the rupture of these boundaries by a conceptual tool, 'A Transformatory Ethic of Inclusion'. This conceptual instrument of rupture embraces the scholarship of feminist ethics and feminist theology. Such a rupture requires examining the ways traditional ethical frameworks themselves have conceptually diminished and devalued the authenticity of people with intellectual disability. A concept of integrality becomes imaginable. Conceptual analysis is framed using a crafting metaphor of a patchwork quilt which is infused with narrative; and by which, such an ethical exploration is undertaken, and impaired, traditional ethical theorising is confronted and transformed.
