Lennard J. Davis > Quotes

“Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society”
― Lennard J. Davis, The Disability Studies Reader

“Curiosity is a restless propensity and often does but hurry us forward the more irresistably, the greater is the danger that attends its indulgence.”
― Lennard J. Davis, Obsession: A History

“Disabilities, despite their affinities with beautifiction procedures, are imagined, in contrast, to be random transformations that move the body away from ideal forms. Within the visual economy in which appearance has come to be the primary index of value for women, feminizing practices normalize the female body, while disabilities abnormalize it. Feminization prompts the gaze, while disability prompts the stare. Feminization alterations increase a woman's cultural capital, while disabilities reduce it.”
― Lennard J. Davis, The Disability Studies Reader

“Throughout the USA hundreds of people, most of whom are poor and members of minorities, are languishing in jails and mental hospitals, their rights to a speedy trial, due process, and justice abandoned. These people have two things in common – they are deaf and they cannot sign or speak.”
― Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body

“As such, the Deaf do not regard their absence of hearing as a disability, any more than a Spanish-speaking person would regard the inability to speak English as a disability.”
― Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body

“...the figure of the disabled woman is best apprehended as a product of conceptual triangulation. She is a cultural third term, a figure constituted by the originary binary pair of the masculine figure and the feminine figure. Thus, the disabled female figure occupies an intragender position; that is, she is not only defined against the masculine figure, but she is imagined as the antithesis of the normative woman as well.”
― Lennard J. Davis, The Disability Studies Reader

“Sign language occupies the interstice where space and silence come together; sign language is the locus where the body meets language.”
― Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body