ENGL 4380 - Lennard J. Davis Enforcing Normalcy (1995)
What is the problem your critic is thinking about? (Provide direct quotes from the critic. You just need to quote. Typically, the moments where critics lay out the issue will be early on in the writing).
What methodology does your critic use to approach this problem? (Sometimes this is super obvious: they’ll say “psychoanalysis” or “post-structuralist.” Otherwise, it becomes clear if you see who your theorist is citing.
Where does your theorist turn to develop their argument? What evidence/archive is important to them? (Quote some specific examples that you find either really clear and useful or super confusing and bizarre. We can work through either option).
Where does your theorist offer up a solution or an alternative to the problem they are addressing? (You’ll typically find this both at the beginning and nearer to the end of the writing. It’s the sort of “So what?” moment. The thing they want you to take away from their work).
the problem of segregating disabled bodies: bottom of 1 top of 2: "the average, well-meaning observer"
the larger issue of who gets to count as a person
the way society writ large thinks about people with disbalities
the problem of "normalcy" and assumed normalcies:
remapping how we think about disability: "the object fo disability studies is not
"objectified experience"
"“The presumption that disability is simply a biological face, a universal plight of humanity throughout the ages needs to be challenged” (2-3)
"This study aims to" (3)
"a politics of power and fear" (4)
How does Davis get us to break that binary of abled/disabled:
"As an example of the act of defamiliarization I am discussing, consider that everyone who reads this book is deaf" (4) It's a thought experiment that asks us to defamiliarize and it relies on "moment"
Turning to linguistic approaches (15-16) and the emphasis of prose (instead of speech and writing)
Turning to linguistic approaches (15-16) and the emphasis of prose (instead of speech and writing)
examples of how these processes are NORMALIZED (the policy and system through which something solidifies/gets accepted as normal)
""Disabilities exists in the realm of the senses…In the space of e-mail, for example, some disabilities disappear: the Deaf, for example, or people using wheelchairs or with other physical limitations, are not disabled" (13). -- this is about showing the ways that space and sensory encounters
the idea of learned behavior and the touch of a child's mother with limb difference:
this story helps expose the process of normalization
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changing language around the binary: ""Able-bodied (or temporarily able-bodied) people safely wall of the severely disabled so that they cannot be seen as part of a continuum of physical differences, just as white culture isolates blackness as a skin color so as not to account for degrees of melanin production." (7).