ABSTRACT
Critical avoidance is underpinned by social encounters of disability. The concept of the normate is one of the main sources for Ato Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. The other source for Quayson’s notion of aesthetic nervousness is the reformulation of literary history from a perspective informed by disability studies. If only to contextualise the argument it is helpful to remember a few things about the beginnings of the field. It has been nearly quarter of a century since Lennard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body defined disability as a term that should have been added to the race, class and gender triad. Edited collections made an important contribution to the emerging field. Most obviously, the success of Enforcing Normalcy was followed by that of the Disability Studies Reader. Not only anthologised in the Disability Studies Reader, Erving Goffman’s Stigma is revisited in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature.
