The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era - Hardcover

Davis, Lennard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0472072021 ISBN 13: 9780472072026

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2014

Synopsis

In an era when human lives are increasingly measured and weighed in relation to the medical and scientific, notions of what is “normal” have changed drastically. While it is no longer useful to think of a person’s particular race, gender, sexual orientation, or choice as “normal,” the concept continues to haunt us in other ways. In The End of Normal, Lennard J. Davis explores changing perceptions of body and mind in social, cultural, and political life as the twenty-first century unfolds. The book’s provocative essays mine the worlds of advertising, film, literature, and the visual arts as they consider issues of disability, depression, physician-assisted suicide, medical diagnosis, transgender, and other identities.

Using contemporary discussions of biopower and biopolitics, Davis focuses on social and cultural production—particularly on issues around the different body and mind. The End of Normal seeks an analysis that works comfortably in the intersection between science, medicine, technology, and culture, and will appeal to those interested in cultural studies, bodily practices, disability, science and medical studies, feminist materialism, psychiatry, and psychology.

About this title

About the Author

Lennard J. Davis is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the departments of English, Disability and Human Development, and Medical Education.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0472072021
• ISBN 13: 9780472072026
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 168