Includes bibliographical references and index.

Constructing normalcy : the bell curve, the novel, and the invention of the disabled body in the nineteenth century / Lennard J. Davis -- Deaf and dumb in ancient Greece / M. Lynn Rose -- "A silent exile on this earth" : the metaphorical construction of deafness in the nineteenth century / Douglas Baynton -- The other arms race / David Serlin -- (Re)writing the genetic body-text : disability, textuality, and the Human Genome Project / James C. Wilson -- Construction of deafness / Harlan Lane -- Abortion and disability : who should and who should not inhabit the world? / Ruth Hubbard -- Disability rights and selective abortion / Marsha Saxton -- Universal design : the work of disability in an age of globalization / Michael Davidson -- Selections from Stigma / Erving Goffman -- Stigma : an enigma demystified / Lerita M. Coleman -- AIDS and its metaphors / Susan Sontag -- Reassigning meaning / Simi Linton -- Disability in theory : from social constructionism to the new realism of the body / Tobin Siebers -- On the government of disability : Foucault, power, and the subject of impairment / Shelley Tremain -- The social model of disability / Tom Shakespeare -- Narrative prosthesis and the materiality of metaphor / David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder -- The dimension of disability oppression : an overview / James I. Charleton -- The end of identity politics and the beginning of dismodernism : on disability as an unstable category / Lennard J. Davis -- Toward a feminist theory of disability / Susan Wendell -- Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory / Rosemarie Garland-Thomson -- Introducing white disability studies : a modest proposal / Chris Bell -- "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 -- Compulsory able-bodiedness and queer/disabled existence / Robert McRuer -- The vulnerable articulate : James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney / Marquard Smith -- Interlude 1 : On (almost) passing / Brenda Brueggeman -- Deaf people : a different center / Carol Padden and Tom Humphries -- A mad fight : psychiatry and disability activism / Bradley Lewis -- Toward a poetics of vision, space, and the body : sign language and literary theory / H.-Dirksen L. Bauman -- The enfreakment of photography / David Hevey -- Blindness and art / Nicholas Mirzoeff -- Blindness and visual culture : an eye witness account / Georgina Kleege -- Disability, life narrative, and representation / G. Thomas Couser -- Helen and Frida / Anne Finger -- Poems / Cheryl Marie Wade -- Poems/ Kenny Fries -- Selections from The cry of the gull / Emmanuelle Laborit.