Synopses & Reviews
"
Bending Over Backwards is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start."
The Minnesota Review
"[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collection's strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read."
American Journal of Occupational Therapy
"Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians. Bending Over Backwards remains an important and useful work for historians as a template for examining the myriad ways disability and Deafness infiltrate vital aspects of our identity, including laws, cultural icons, literature, and citizenship."
H-Net Reviews
"Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues."
Novel
"It is crucial, if at times uncomfortable, reading for medical professionals and scholars in the medical humanities alike. . . . Daring to mix the literary and the medical, the symbolic and the instrumental, the interpretive and the interventionist, Davis demonstrates what disability can teach us about the life that awaits any human baby."
Literature and Medicine
"This superlative book is highly recommended for undergraduates, scholars, and researchers in the fields of disability studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ethics, and cultural studies."Choice
"Lennard Davis is history in the making; for he is one of the foremost proponents of "disability studies," the newest theoretical kid on the block, noteworthy in part because it brings together scholars from the humanities and the medical sciences."
Stanley Fish, in Chicago Tribune
"A collection of essays written over several years for different audiences, it contains fascinating traces of Davis's intellectual journey from novel theorist and Foucauldian to disability studeis scholar and memoirist."American Literature
With the advent of the human genome, cloning, stem-cell research and many other developments in the way we think of the body, disability studies provides an entirely new way of thinking about the body in its relation to politics, the environment, the legal system, and global economies.
Bending Over Backwards reexamines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal system, the history of science and medicine, eugenics, and genetics. Throughout, he maintains that disability is the prime category of postmodernity because it redefines the body in relation to concepts of normalcy, which underlie the very foundations of democracy and humanistic ideas about the body.
Bending Over Backwards argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
Review
"Bending Over Backwards is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start." - The Minnesota Review
Review
"[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collection's strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read." - American Journal of Occupational Therapy
Review
"Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians. Bending Over Backwards remains an important and useful work for historians as a template for examining the myriad ways disability and Deafness infiltrate vital aspects of our identity, including laws, cultural icons, literature, and citizenship." - H-Net Reviews
Review
"Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues."-Novel,
Review
"Lennard Davis is history in the making; for he is one of the foremost proponents of "disability studies," the newest theoretical kid on the block, noteworthy in part because it brings together scholars from the humanities and the medical sciences."
"Bending Over Backwards is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start."
"[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collection's strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read."
"Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians. Bending Over Backwards remains an important and useful work for historians as a template for examining the myriad ways disability and Deafness infiltrate vital aspects of our identity, including laws, cultural icons, literature, and citizenship."
"Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues."
Review
" certainly deserves a prominent place on the bookshelves of students of contemporary religion. It could serve to inspire scholars of other fundamentalist movements to look more closely at issues of generational dissatisfaction, heroic masculinity, and the emergence of new forms of piety."-AJS,
Review
"This is an interesting and well written book."-Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter,
Review
“This brief but exceptionally rich ethnography of the Haredi, the ultra-Orthodox male Yeshiva world in Israel, is an important contribution on many levels. Stadler successfully pioneers a methodology for studying an institution she cannot directly access: the methodologically preferred field approach—participant-observation of behavior—is, in this setting, not possible for a woman. She gets around thisbarrier by using alternative tools. Moreover, given the dearth of true observational studies of this bastion of male Jewish learning, this pioneering effort not only unravels some complexities of the Yeshiva world, but also uncovers the seeds of rebellion brewing among younger scholars who are verbalizing objections to their teachers rejection of integration and full participation in Israeli society. . . . If Stadlers analysis is correct, a mini-revolution is in the offing for Haredi society and its future role and status in Israel. A must read! . . . Essential.”
-Choice,
Review
“n this ground-breaking work, Stadler accomplishes the seemingly impossible by penetrating the exclusive male enclave of the ultra-orthodox yeshiva. Her methods are not merely innovative, but truly inspired. The results are remarkable.”
-Shaul Kelner,Vanderbilt University
Synopsis
With the advent of the human genome, cloning, stem-cell research and many other developments in the way we think of the body, disability studies provides an entirely new way of thinking about the body in its relation to politics, the environment, the legal system, and global economies.
Bending Over Backwards reexamines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal system, the history of science and medicine, eugenics, and genetics. Throughout, he maintains that disability is the prime category of postmodernity because it redefines the body in relation to concepts of normalcy, which underlie the very foundations of democracy and humanistic ideas about the body.
Bending Over Backwards argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
Synopsis
Bending Over Backwards reexamines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal system, the history of science and medicine, eugenics, and genetics.
Synopsis
2009 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleThe ultra-Orthodox yeshiva, or Jewish seminary, is a space reserved for men, and for a focus on religious ideals. Fundamentalist forms of piety are usually believed to be quite resistant to change. In Yeshiva Fundamentalism, Nurit Stadler uncovers surprising evidence that firmly religious and pious young men of this community are seeking to change their institutions to incorporate several key dimensions of the secular world: a redefinition of masculinity along with a transformation of the family, and participation in civic society through the labor market, the army, and the construction of organizations that aid terror victims. In their private thoughts and sometimes public actions, they are resisting the demands placed on them to reject all aspects of the secular world.
Because women are not allowed in the yeshiva setting, Stadler's research methods had to be creative. She invented a way to simulate yeshiva learning with young yeshiva men by first studying with an informant to learn key religious texts, often having to do with family life, sexuality, or participation in the larger society. This informant then invited students over to discuss these texts with Stadler and himself outside of the yeshiva setting. This strategy enabled Stadler to gain access to aspects of yeshiva life in which a woman is usually unable to participate, and to hear "unofficial" thoughts and reactions which would have been suppressed had the interviews taken place within the yeshiva.
Yeshiva Fundamentalism provides an intriguing and at times surprising glimpse inside the all-male world of the ultra-orthodox yeshivas in Israel, while providing insights relevant to the larger context of transformations of fundamentalism worldwide. While there has been much research into how contemporary feminism has influenced the study of fundamentalist groups worldwide, little work has focused on ultra-Orthodox men's desires to change, as Stadler does here, showing how fundamentalist men are themselves involved in the formulation of new meanings of piety, gender, modernity and relations with the Israeli state.
About the Author
Lennard J. Davis is head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is also Professor of Disability and Human Development. His books include
Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body and
The Disability Studies Reader.
Michael Bérubé is Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, and the author of several books, including Whats Liberal about the Liberal Arts, The Employment of English, and Life As We Know It, which was a New York Times notable book and NPR book of the year. He is general editor of NYU Presss Cultural Front series, has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers, and writes a popular blog, American Airspace, at michaelberube.com.