Bending Over Backwardsкнига
Аннотация: n 1995, in the opening pages of Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard Davis noted that identity politics seemed to have left one form of identity unaccounted for: "there is a strange and really unaccountable silence when the issue of disability is raised (or, more to the point, never raised); the silence is stranger, too, since so much of left criticism has devoted itself to the issue of the body, of the social construction of sexuality and gender." 1 In the book's conclusion Davis returned to this theme, at a slightly higher rhetorical pitch: "the concept of disability," he claimed, "has been relegated to a sideshow, a freak show at that, far away from the academic midway of progressive ideas and concerns." 2 Two years earlier, the late James Tuttleton, writing in The New Criterion, had said something similar-not about disability, but about left criticism in toto: "As lit-profs are a national laughingstock," he cried in a somewhat hysterical review of Gerald Graff 's Beyond the Culture Wars, "the only proper response is to ignore the freaks." 3Freaked out as Tuttleton was by the amiable proposal to "teach the conflicts," one can only imagine how freaky he would have considered Davis's exhortation to consider disability as a critical term for the humanities.But what strikes me now about Davis's claim isn't the phrase "freak show" but the more innocuous phrase "sideshow."For as we've heard many times in the 1990s, left criticism of the academic variety is itself a sideshow, even to many writers and organizers on the left: the main event is economic inequality, or the main event is the illegitimacy of the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, or the main event is the contested election results in Florida, or the main event is September 11 and its aftermath.Theories of the social construction of sexuality and gender may have relegated disability to the margins, but to the margins of what?Of already socially marginal discourses?It was not long ago, in other words, that one of the most prominent and prolific writers in the newly emergent field of disability studies could plausibly construe his field as the sideshow of a sideshow, featuring the freakiest of the freaks.The field has grown tremendously since Davis wrote those words, certainly; and yet just as certainly, disability studies has not so transformed the humanities-or the terrain of left criticismthat it is too late to gloss its still-marginal status.In Time Passages, George Lipsitz underwrote his forays into the sideshow of cultural politics by quoting jazz saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk's straight-up denial: "this ain't no sideshow." 4I could emphatically say the same of Bending over Backwards.But I'd like to show another side of the politics of the sideshow, and cite a text that poses the question of its subject's marginality at the very outset.At the opening of David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia, General
Год издания: 2002
Авторы: Lennard J. Davis
Источник: New York University Press eBooks
Ключевые слова: Latin American and Latino Studies
Другие ссылки: New York University Press eBooks (HTML)
Library Union Catalog of Bavaria, Berlin and Brandenburg (B3Kat Repository) (PDF)
Library Union Catalog of Bavaria, Berlin and Brandenburg (B3Kat Repository) (HTML)
Library Union Catalog of Bavaria, Berlin and Brandenburg (B3Kat Repository) (PDF)
Library Union Catalog of Bavaria, Berlin and Brandenburg (B3Kat Repository) (HTML)
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