Includes bibliographical references (p. [258]-306) and index.

1. Constructing normalcy : the bell curve, the novel, and the invention of the disabled body in the nineteenth century / Lennard J. Davis -- 2. Deaf and dumb in ancient Greece / M. Lynn Rose -- 3. "A silent exile on this earth" : the metaphorical construction of deafness in the nineteenth century / Douglas Baynton -- 4. The other arms race / David Serlin -- 5. (Re)writing the genetic body-text : disability, textuality, and the human genome project / James C. Wilson -- 6. Construction of deafness / Harlan Lane -- 7. Abortion and disability : who should and who should not inhabit the world? / Ruth Hubbard -- 8. Disability rights and selective abortion / Marsha Saxton -- 9. Universal design : the work of disability in an age of globalization / Michael Davidson -- 10. Selections from Stigma / Erring Goffman -- 11. Stigma : an enigma demystified / Lerita M. Coleman -- 12. AIDS and its metaphors / Susan Sontag -- 13. Reassigning meaning / Simi Linton -- 14. Disability in theory : from social constructionism to the new realism of the body / Tobin Siebers -- 15. On the government of disability : Foucault, power, and the subject of impairment / Shelley Tremain -- 16. The social model of disability / Tom Shakespeare -- 17. Narrative prosthesis and the materiality of metaphor / David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder -- 18. The dimensions of disability oppression : an overview / James I. Charlton -- 19. The end of identity politics and the beginning of dismodernism : on disability as an unstable category / Lennard J. Davis -- 20. Toward a feminist theory of disability / Susan Wendell -- 21. Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory / Rosemarie Garland-Thomson -- 22. Introducing white disability studies : a modest proposal / Chris Bell -- 23. "When black women start going on prozac ..." : the politics of race, gender, and emotional distress in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah's Willow weep for me / Anna Mollow -- 24. Compulsory able-bodiedness and queer/disabled existence / Robert McRuer -- 25. The vulnerable articulate : James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney / Marquard Smith -- 26. Interlude 1 : on (almost) passing / Brenda Brueggeman -- 27. Deaf people : a different center / Carol Padden and Tom Humphries -- 28. A mad fight : psychiatry and disability activism / Bradley Lewis -- 29. Toward a poetics of vision, space, and the body : sign language and literary theory / H-Dirksen L. Bauman -- 30. The enfreakment of photography / David Hevey -- 31. Blindness and art / Nicholas Mirzoeff -- 32. Blindness and visual culture : an eye witness account / Georgina Kleege -- 33. Disability, life narrative, and representation / G. Thomas Couser -- 34. Helen and Frida / Anne Finger -- 35. Poems / Cheryl Marie Wade -- 36. Poems / Kenny Fries -- 37. Selections from The cry of the gull / Emmanuelle Laborit.