Disability Studies

Examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and rewrite those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.

James W. Trent uses public documents, private letters, investigative reports, and rare photographs to explore our changing perceptions of mental retardation over the past 150 years. He contends that the economic vulnerability of mentally retarded people (and their families), more than the claims made for their intellectual or social limitations, has determined their institutional treatment.

First popular history of the disability rights movement. Includes conversations with courageous people who fight for freedom of movement, meaningful employment, and a life of dignity and promise.

Beginning with the roots of the disease in demonic possession and its secular successors, Davis traces the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive compulsive disorder and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis's graceful analysis.

From multiple perspectives--including literary analysis, ethnography, and autobiography--contributors consider how sex and disability come together and how disabled people negotiate sex and sexual identities in ableist and heteronormative culture.

A history of the struggle for disability rights in the USA. It is a complex story of shifts in consciousness and policy, of changing focuses on particular disabilities and of activism and policymaking across disabilities. The genesis of the human rights approach to disability is recounted.

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 postmodernist perspective. Drawing together experts in cultural studies, literary criticism, sociology, biology, the visual arts, pedagogy and post-colonial studies, the collection provides a comprehensive approach to the issue of disability.

This book argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, feminist discussions of bodily life, and feminist criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. The story of the author's own experience of chronic illness is woven through the text.