The second edition of The Disability Studies Reader builds and improves upon the classic first edition, which has sold well over 6000 copies since 1999. As a field, disability studies burst onto the scene across the social sciences and humanities in the 1990s, and the first edition of the reader gathered the best work that had been written on the subject, including essays by famous authors such as Susan Sontag and Erving Goffman. The new edition is more global in its coverage and adds material on genetic testing, the human genome, queer studies, and issues in developing countries. The size of the audience has grown since the first edition's publication, and the second edition's new material will make it even more useful for courses on the subject. Courses on the subject have mushroomed in the past ten years, and can now be found across the social sciences, humanities, and behavioral sciences.

I. Historical Perspectives:

1. Constructing Normalcy, Lennard Davis
2. Deaf and Dumb in Ancient Greece, Martha Rose
3. A Silent Exile on this Earth, 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

II. Politics of Disability

6. Constructions of Deafness, Harlan Lane
7. Abortion and Disability: How 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

III. Stigma and Illness

10. Selections from Stigma, Erving Goffman
11. Stigma: An Enigma Demystified, Lerita Coleman
12. AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag.

IV. Theorizing Disability

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. James Charleton, The Dimension of Disability Oppression: An Overview

V. The Question of Identity

19. The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category, Lennard 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, Anna Mollow
24. Robert McCruer, Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence
25. The Vulnerable Articulate: James Gillingham, Amiee Mullins, and Matthew Barney, Marquard Smith
26. On Almost Passing, Brenda Brueggeman
27. Deafness: A Different Center, Carol Padden and Tom Humphries
28. A Mad Fight: A Mad Fight: Psychiatry and Disability Activism, Bradley Lewis

VI. Disability and Culture

29. Towards a Poetics of Vision, Space, and the Body, H. Dirksen Bauman
30. The Enfreakment of Photography, David Hevey
31. Blindness and Art, Nicholas Mirzoeff
32. Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account, Georgina Kleege
33. Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation, G. Thomas Couser.

VII. Fiction, Memoir, and Poetry

34. Helen and Frida, Anne Finger
35. Poems, Cheryl Marie Wade
36. Beauty and Variations, Kenny Fries
37. The Cry of the Gull, Emanuel Laborit
38. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean Dominique Bauby