The Disability Studies Reader The Institute of ...（研究所的残疾研究读者u2026u2026）.pdf

The Disability Studies Reader Fourth Edition Lennard J. Davis ~ ~ ~~o~!~~n~~~up NEW YORK AND LONDON CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Normality, Power, and Culture Lennard J. Davis We live in a world of norms. Each ofus endeavors to be normal or else deliberately tries to avoid that state. We consider what the average person does, thinks, earns, or consumes. We rank our intelligence, our cholesterol level, our weight, height, sex drive, bodily dimensions along some conceptual line from subnormal to above-average. We consume a minimum daily balance of vitamins and nutrients based on what an average human should consume. Our children are ranked in school and tested to determine where they fit into a normal curve of learning, of intelligence. Doctors measure and weigh them to see ifthey are above or below average on the height and weight curves. There is probably no area of contemporary life in which some idea of a norm, mean, or average has not been calculated. To understand the disabled body, one must return to the concept of the norm, the normal body. So much of writing about disability has focused on the disabled person as the object of study, just as the study of race has focused on the person of color. But as with recent scholarship on race, which has turned its attention to whiteness and inter- sectionality, I would like to focus not so much on the construction of disability as on the construction of normalcy. I do this because the problem is not the person with disabili- ties; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the problem of the disabled person. A common assumption would be that some concept of the norm must have always existed. After all, people seem to have an inherent desire to compare themselves tooth- ers. But the idea of a norm is less a condition of human nature than it is a fe