New Term; New Techniques

This academic year I am teaching two new courses which I have specifically designed to include Critical Disability Studies content. My new final-year option 'Blindness and Vision in French Culture' will use a range of texts, films and images to interrogate the French obsession with vision and the visual and what this might tell us about what 'blindness' means. I am also co-teaching a new first-year course, 'Decoding France: Language, Culture, Identity' for which I have designed my section around Jean-Dominique Bauby's fascinating memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

The introduction of these new courses seems a perfect time to make my teaching experience - and my students' learning experience - more blindness-friendly. One of my greatest challenges as a teacher is recognising my students and distinguishing between them. I know all my students' names but I don't know their faces. So in the classroom I hardly ever know who I am talking to. My face blindness means that I sometimes do not even recognise people - like my husband or my children - whom I know extremely well. So I've been thinking about strategies to help me put names to faces in my classes.

I always ask my students to tell me their names before they speak in class, but this, like shouting out instead of hand-raising - is a difficult habit for them to get into. So this year I am going to sit my students in alphabetical order and ask them to keep the same seat in each class. This way I'll be able to work out who is absent and who is present by clocking empty chairs and I'll know which students to call on for answers. I'll also be able to use the position of their voices to match them with names and hopefully once I've made the voice-name connection, I'll start recognising them when they talk to me outside class.

My aim in thinking more proactively about how to manage my blindness in the classroom is not purely selfish. I also want my students to experience blindness as a creative way of being and doing rather than as a tragedy. I want them to study blindness in texts, but also to think about how their habits and assumptions unintentionally promote the kind of occularcentric world which I'd like my courses to critique.

David Bolt; The Metanarrative of Blindness (2014)

The image shows a hardback copy of David Bolt's The Metanarrative of Blindness: 

A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Literature 

(Ann Arbor: Michigan U.P., 2014)

There is nothing quite like the combination of excitement and fear an academic experiences when they come across a book which is closely related to their current research. This is exactly how I felt when I heard about David Bolt's new book, The Metanarrative of Blindness. I was excited by the potential for new discoveries, discussions and connections which this book would provide, yet I was terrified that David's work would somehow duplicate or pre-empt what I am trying to say.

I am pleased to say that by the time I finished reading the book, my fears had vanished and my excitement had more than doubled. This is a fascinating and readable exploration of how a range of fictional and autobiographical texts represent ‘blindness’ and ‘the blind’. Its originality lies not so much in David’s discussions of the texts themselves, but more in his argument that fictional representations of blindness have created a set of myths and stereotypes of blindness which dictate how society treats the blind. Indeed David even makes the important point that blind people themselves have also been unwittingly influenced by such images. David’s book is different from much traditional literary criticism because it constantly compares his own experience of being blind with fictional representations of blindness in order to show the gap between reality and fiction.

Aside from this overarching argument, there are many useful elements in the book and I will certainly be using it with students in my new undergraduate course ‘Blindness and Vision in French Culture’ which I am teaching at Royal Holloway from September .The Introduction provides an excellent summary of the major trends and tensions in Disability Studies in general, with references to authorities including Goffmann, Garland-Thomson, McRuer, Davis, Mitchell and Snyder, and Chapter One explores the politics of blindness in particular. Here, David very carefully explains his somewhat controversial choice of terminology. Unlike many blind activists and scholars, including myself, David rejects the terms ‘the blind’ and ‘blind people’, preferring to use ‘those of us who have or do not have a visual impairment’. There are good reasons for him to do this, not least because his decision highlights the very problems of terminology he is trying to avoid, but I find his choice of words clumsy and at first I was frustrated by how much it disrupted the flow of both his prose and his arguments. Like Georgina Kleege in Sight Unseen, I prefer to proudly reclaim terms like ‘blind’ and ‘partially blind’ as celebrations of a state of sightlessness usually considered negative. But David’s explanation of the reasons behind his choice do make sense. In fact they do a great job of revealing the advantages and disadvantages of the medical, individual and radical social models of disability, the potential pitfalls (or possibilities) of political correctness and the power of even apparently neutral language to influence and (mis)inform. Like myself, David is speaking at the Society of Disability Studies conference in Minneapolis next month: I'm looking forward to discussing his choice of terminology with him and others at the event.

In the rest of the book, David explains how three interrelated neologisms - ‘ocularnormativsm’, ‘ocularcentrism’ and ‘opthalmocentrism’ - both belong to and persist in creating a 'metanarrative of blindness', in other words, 'the story in relation to which those of us who have visual impairments often find ourselves defined, an overriding narrative that seems to displace agency' (p. 10). David's analysis of a wide range of texts shows the persistent presence of a number of myths of blindness which I have also found in some of my nineteenth-century French texts. The ‘seeing-knowing metaphor’ (p. 18), the ‘blindness-darkness synonymy’ (p. 21) and the odd idea that people are either fully blind or fully sighted (pp. 69-70), are particularly widespread. In Chapter Two he shows how the use of labels such as ‘the blind man’ and ‘the blind girl’, creates a belief in blindness-as-difference which sets blind characters apart from the (implicitly sighted) reader. Chapters Three and Four both deal with a range of misconceptions surrounding blindness and sexuality. One of the most interesting arguments in Chapter Three is the discussion of how the recurrent infantilisation of blind characters frequently rests on the misguided assumption that independence is more valuable than dependency. By challenging the independence-dependency hierarchical binary which underpins traditional notions of rehabilitation, lifestyle and progress, David is able to criticise dominant medical and social discourses of disability. This is just one example of how readings of fictional representations of disability can help to problematise current ways of thinking. This is something which I hope my own analyses of blindness in fiction have also been doing.

In the following chapter, David criticises positive stereotyping by showing how 'more than being inaccurate, cultural representations of extraordinary senses serve, at best, to render magical the talent and achievements of people who have visual impairments and, at worst, to justify the ascription of various animal-like characteristics' (p. 67). Chapter Five is an insightful survey of blindness’s association with contagion in science-fiction writing (including readings of key works like H. G. Wells' 'The Country of the Blind', John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids and José Saramago's Blindness) in which David challenges the recent tendency to read references to successful blind characters as a celebration of disability. Instead he argues that stories featuring blind communities tend to emphasise the differences between the blind and the sighted which in turn suggest that ‘the blind' are somehow inherently different from the sighted. Chapter Six uses the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault to criticise the hierarchical binary relationship between the sighted gazer and the blind object of the gaze whilst Chapter Seven calls the blindness-as-tragedy myth into question.

David’s discussion of a wide range of twentieth-century texts represents an impressive survey of representations of blindness and the blind. I find him most convincing when he compares his discussions of fictional depictions with the lived experience of the blind and the partially blind: his use of examples from his own life, as well as extracts from the autobiographical writings of Georgina Kleege, Stephen Kuusisto and John Hull is particularly informative and should teach sighted readers much about their own misconceptions of blindness. This emphasis on lived experience is important because it demonstrates that the 'metanarrative of blindness' occurs in society as well as – or perhaps even more so than - in fictional representations. David is an accomplished social commentator who uses evidence from twentieth-century fiction to demonstrate how 'the blind' are perceived in modern society.

The main problem I have with David’s book does not in fact have anything to do with blindness as such and it feels a little churlish to mention it here, particularly as it is related to my (in fact unfounded) worries about overlap with my own work. I find the subtitle of the book, ‘A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Texts’ misleading, perhaps even insulting. Whilst the majority of his texts were written in English, David also pays sustained attention to several French authors – Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide and Jacques Derrida - whose works were neither originally written nor published in English. I am worried by this refusal to acknowledge the linguistic and cultural identities of these texts: not only does this negate the huge influence that French literature and culture has had on the history of representations of blindness, it also reflects a wider tendency amongst anglophone academics, publishers and readers to ‘claim’ such texts for the dominant Anglo-American canon when it suits them to do so. I am pretty sure that my French friends and colleagues would be outraged to see French classics like La symphonie pastorale and Histoire de l’oeil described as ‘anglophone’!

This niggle notwithstanding, this book is a crucial contribution to 'Blindness Studies' and comes very highly recommended.

Blindness and/on the Radio

I have already written here about my exciting visit to Salford's Media City to be interviewed by Jenni Murray for BBC Woman's Hour back in September. Yesterday I was lucky enough to be back on the programme, this time talking about women and blindness.

My experience was still wonderful, but it was very different from my first time. Instead of travelling to Salford, staying over in a nice hotel, meeting the other guests and being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of a busy radio studio, I did the interview alone in a small room at Radio Oxford. Once I was connected to Salford, I exchanged a few words with the studio manager to check for sound levels, and then I tried to sit back and relax whilst I was waiting for my turn. The studio very kindly played me radio 4 through my headphones as I waited but I nonetheless had a lot of time to worry about what was going to happen. Despite the soothing effect of my favourite radio station, which has always calmed me in stressful or lonely situations, I had a hard job controlling my nerves and I was pretty relieved when my turn finally came.

As the presenter, Sheila McClennon, introduced our segment and asked me my first question, I suddenly went from being passive listener to active participant. Although I had done this before, I still wasn't prepared for how dizzying it feels being responsible for providing the content of a programme you have been happily listening to only seconds earlier. As the adrenaline started flowing my nervousness was replaced by a mixture of excitement and pride.

It is doubly fitting to be interviewed about blindness on the radio and over the phone. Radio presenters are brilliantly attuned to the non-visual nature of their medium. They build audio description into everything they say without even thinking about it and are always very careful to use interviewees' names each time they address them. This is primarily so that the listeners always know whose voice they are hearing. But it also helps phone interviewees know which questions are being addressed to them. When I described my long-distance intervention to someone yesterday, she immediately wondered how hard it must have been for me to respond to questions without being able to see the faces and reactions of Sheila McClennon and fellow guest, Denise Leigh. I resisted pointing out the irony of her observation. What she actually meant was how difficult it would have been for a fully sighted person. In fact it is incredibly easy for me to respond to questions put to me over the phone because I spend my life talking to people without seeing their faces. Where a sighted person might have noticed a lack of eye contact, I really love being able to talk without worrying about trying to see, or pretending to see, others' reactions. I am an expert at getting all my clues from sound: maybe this is why being interviewed on the radio feels like second nature to me. I went on Woman's Hour to try and explain that blindness is not a tragedy, a lack or a descent into darkness. It is just a different way of being in the world. If some blind people resent their sightlessness it is because we live in an occulocentric world which privileges sight over all the other senses. But it doesn't have to be that way. Anyone involved with radio, as listener, presenter, producer or contributor, already knows that blindness is not something to be feared, resisted or even necessarily cured. Whether we realise it or not, radio is a constant celebration of the power of blindness, a constant reminder that sight is not necessary in order to have a complete and fulfilling sense of the world.

The Voice Part 3: I Didn't See that Coming

I do not usually enjoy reading autobiographies and I am especially suspicious both of 'triumph over tragedy' disability narratives and of autobiographies written in haste after the subject has been shot into the spotlight by winning a TV talent show like The Voice. So it was with some trepidation that I curled up with the kindle version of Andrea Begley's account of her rise to fame, I Didn't see that Coming. I have already written two posts about how Andrea Begley's partial blindness has been depicted and discussed: the first when I initially came across her in the show's so-called blind auditions and the second as she unexpectedly (and somewhat controversially) went on to win the competition. In both these posts I made the point that the public have a much more disabling attitude towards blindness in general, and Andrea's partial blindness in particular, than she herself does. I am delighted to report that Andrea's book is exactly what I hoped it would be: a humorous, clever and personal debunking of many of the myths of blindness which are still so inexplicably embedded in society's collective consciousness.

Andrea is refreshingly honest, practical and open not only about what she can and cannot see but, more interestingly, about how she feels about her partial blindness. She is never sad, self-pitying or mournful. Her partial blindness is never a 'tragedy', a 'hurdle' or a something to be 'overcome' or 'cured'. Mostly it is not even an issue and occasionally it is an 'annoyance' or a 'frustration' which Andrea approaches with a wonderfully self-depreciating mixture of mischief and fun. But Andrea is very careful to emphasise that she is not a superhero. She has no extraordinary powers of hearing and is not one of those relentlessly perky 'super-crips' who feel the need to over-achieve as a kind of 'compensation'.  She is simply hard-working, well-supported and ambitious and she has got where she is through a combination of an unforgiving work ethic, lots of luck and a fair bit of talent. Anyone who voted for Andrea to win The Voice out of misplaced feelings of sympathy and pity has completely misunderstood what her partial blindness represents.

It is hugely important to have disabled people in the public gaze. But this is not so that other disabled people can feel 'inspired' to 'overcome' their own particular 'struggles'. Such an approach serves only to further stigmatise disability by distancing it. Rather, we need people like Andrea to write their stories so that the so-called 'able-bodied' can begin to understand that disability is not a necessarily negative condition deserving of pity and condescension. I think Andrea's book should be required reading for anyone who has ever looked at a disabled person with sadness. Not only does it answer many of the 'Is it okay to...' questions which worry the non-disabled, it also completely demystifies life with sight loss.

If I have one criticism of Andrea, it is that she readily admits that she relates to the world in a sighted way. She went to a mainstream school and has always learned by sighted methods where possible. She would still rather not use a white cane and has never learnt Braille. She does now use audio books and screen-reading software but I suspect that she would rather describe herself as 'partially sighted' than 'partially blind'. Andrea's resolutely sighted approach to the world is further evidence that we live in such an oculocentric world that even the partially blind feel the pressures to conform to sighted ways of being. But now that she is in such a prominent and powerful position, Andrea has the chance to further dismantle the sight-based myths which her book begins to attack. I'd like to see her wield her white cane in public more proudly and celebrate the power of the tactile by learning Braille.

BBC Radio Four

Me and Jenni Murray just after my interview. 

Many thanks to fellow guest and children's book illustrator Sarah McIntyre for taking this photo.

Sarah has written a great account of our Woman's Hour adventure here. 

I have loved BBC Radio 4 all my adult life. We have at least six radios in our house and I increasingly listen via my phone wherever I am. Radio 4 wakes me up every morning and accompanies me on car, train, bus and plane journeys. It has stopped me feeling lonely in hotel rooms from Salford to Salt Lake City and keeps me amused when I am cooking. I even listened to Radio 4 whilst giving birth to my two sons.

Yesterday was quite simply one of the most exciting days of my life. I moved from passive listener to active participant as I was interviewed by the majestic Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour (from 30:30). I was talking about my take on the What I See project and the ways modern society is obsessed with how we look.

It seemed particularly fitting that I was arguing for a rethinking of the hierarchy of the senses via a largely sightless medium. Radio 4 is an essential part of mainstream British culture. And yet its enduring hold over the nation testifies to the fact that sight is not a necessary part of our lived experience. Yesterday I realised that radio journalists and producers build a subtle kind of audio description into everything they do. Places and people are announced as a matter of course. Every time Jenni Murray asked me a question she prefaced it with my name. Her primary reason for doing this was to remind listeners who I was and to differentiate my voice from that of my fellow interviewee Edwina Dunn. But Jenni's technique was crucial to me for another reason. Because I cannot always see enough to know when someone is addressing me, I rely on the kinds of audio prompts which are much more common on the radio than in real life.

The Woman's Hour team: 

Jenni Murray in the centre, and from the left Assistant Producer Jane Worsley, Producer Bernadette McConnell, fellow guest Sarah McIntyre and me. 

There is no doubt that modern society places too much emphasis on the visual. And this has the unpleasant consequence of marginalising the blind and the partially blind. But my experiences yesterday reminded me that anyone who engages with radio - as listener, presenter, producer or technician - already has an intuitive appreciation of the non-sighted world. Anyone who listens to the radio already knows what it is like to be blind: it is not a tragedy, it is just a different way of being.

What I See when I look in the Mirror

According to its press release, the What I See Project is 'a global online platform that recognises and amplifies women's voices'. I was delighted to be asked to be part of this fascinating project, but I was also worried by the project's apparent emphasis on the visual. As I say in my video reflection, modern society's obsession with how we look has the unintended consequence of privileging sight over all the other senses. This in turn has the nasty effect of turning blindness into a tragedy. 

I have found that society's obsession with the misery of blindness makes it very difficult for the blind and the partially blind to feel happy and confident about themselves. When pity is the prevailing emotion you encounter in strangers, it is easy to think of yourself as a victim. Self-pity is a destructive state of mind; it leads to low self-esteem and depression. But until society stops pitying the blind, how will the blind learn to stop pitying themselves?

I want to use my part in the What I See project to encourage women to think critically about our relationship with sight. Why do we care what we see in the mirror? Why is appearance to crucial to us? Do we really learn important details about a person from how they look to us? My face-blindness means I cannot recognise my family, friends and colleagues by their facial features. Instead I recognise them by their general shape, their unique style and their voice. This can have its disadvantages but it also has its uses. It constantly reminds me that we are much more than what we appear to be: we have experiences, history, memories which are not necessarily visible on our surface. As another contributor to the What I See project, Karen Morris at Beyond the Bathroom Scale reminds us, bodily appearance is overrated. Karen writes eloquently about the need to embrace the reality of how our bodies look here.

The communicator videos and ambassador profiles on the What I See webpage are reassuringly resistant to the purely visual. It turns out that I needn't have worried. Most women see much more than their surface appearance when they look in the mirror. But society at large is still obsessed with sight. Hopefully this will change in the wake of this exciting project.

Upload a video describing what you see when you look in the mirror and you might win an invitation to the What I See launch event at the Science Museum on October 1st.

On Giving Directions to the Blind

Last week I visited the RNIB to use their research library. I had found a couple of promising nineteenth-century texts through their online catalogue and as I had to be in London on Friday anyway, I made an appointment and requested the materials.

As this was my first visit to Judd Street I was looking forward to seeing how visiting an overtly blind-friendly environment differed from my usual experiences. I find going to unfamiliar places challenging and disorienting and usually need some help to find my way around at first. But surely the RNIB would be different?

I planned my route from King's Cross using the excellent map I found on the RNIB website. As well as giving street names in large print, it has useful landmarks like shops, traffic lights and post boxes marked on it too. Even though I'd never been there before I easily found my way to the well-signed entrance.

But once I was inside things were less clear. At a desk which I took to be Reception I gave my name and asked directions to the research library. The response I received was not quite what I was expecting: 'Just through there' said the receptionist, pointing vaguely. As I don't find visual gestures very enlightening, I asked for a bit more detail: 'It's just down there' wasn't quite the response I was hoping for.

Nonplussed by this less-than-helpful welcome, I headed into what I now know is the shop and asked the next person I came across for directions. He didn't appear to know that the RNIB had a research library, but his colleague helpfully told me to walk round to my left until I came to a low desk. Finally a set of directions that I could relate to! I collected my documents and spent a happy couple of hours reading about Victorian visitors to the Institute for the Blind in Paris.

But my mind kept wandering back to my disappointing welcome. How was it that the UK's leading charity for blind people was so resolutely reliant on the visual? I had been expecting tactile floor guides, Braille notices and an abundance of aural clues. Instead I was given a welcome that compared pretty unfavourably with the help I get in most 'sighted' environments.

At first I was shocked and upset that the RNIB of all people weren't doing more to challenge the hierarchy of the senses. But then I had a thought. One of the main aims of the RNIB is to help those with sight loss come to terms with their condition. They believe in 'rehabilitation' 'adaptation' and 'quality of life'. So perhaps their unhelpful welcome was not a result of ignorance or lack of imagination. Maybe it was a rather abrupt way of reminding me that it is my responsibility to adjust to the resolutely visual world in which I find myself.

Andromaque: Audio Descrption in the Seventeenth Century

I have been teaching French literature to undergraduates for 15 years or so but I rarely venture any further back than 1789: I am a dix-neuviemiste at heart but am equally at home teaching twentieth-century fiction and film. So this year it was quite a shock to find myself down to lecture on Racine's seventeenth-century drama Andromaque as part of one of our new first-year courses. As a prose specialist I'm not used to studying plays and I sat down to read it last night rather nervously. What if I couldn't get my head round the complexities of Racine's text? How could I possibly teach the play to students if I couldn't understand it myself?

I emerged a few hours later completely in awe of Racine's tragedy. The plot was gripping, the language was both compelling and beautiful and the whole thing was much easier to follow than I had been expecting. This blog is not the place to indulge in a detailed assessment of the play but there is one aspect of Racine's drama which particularly appealed to me. Unlike almost all the playwrights I have come across, Racine uses hardly any stage directions. Instead, it is the characters themselves who announce the action as it happens. So, in Act IV, Secne 2, Andromaque's line: 'C'est Hermione. Allons fuyons sa violence' (Here is Hermione, let us flee her violence), announces both Hermione's entrance and Andromaque's exit. French drama specialist Joe Harris tells me that this intriguing technique has its roots in the practicalities of seventeenth-century staging. Racine's plays were first performed not in theatres but in badly lit real tennis courts where most of the audience would struggle to see what was happening on the narrow and distant stage. So Racine built verbal prompts into his plays as both a set of cues for the actors, and a set of clues for the audience. What I like most about this early modern predecessor of audio description is the way that it does not take sight for granted. Our modern occulocentric world is obsessed with the primacy of vision. It would never occur to modern playwrights that spectators might have difficulty seeing what is happening on stage. Audio description is an extra feature which is added after the fact (if indeed it is added at all). It is not considered an integral part of the work (although perhaps it should be). But Racine's way of having his characters announce their own and others' entrances and exits makes the play equally accessible to blind and sighted audiences (as well as to blind and sighted actors). By verbalising movement in this way, Racine creates a properly multi-sensory experience which modern playwrights would do well to learn from. I wonder how different plays (and films) would be if they were conceived with the blind in mind from the start.

Offensive Portrayal of the Blind Goes Viral

What do Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, an image by photographer Paul Strand and a recent web-based publicity campaign have in common? They all exploit the stereotype of the blind beggar for their own ends.

As part of their 'Change Your Words, Change Your World' campaign, online marketing company Purplefeather made a video a couple of years ago which I have only just come across. This video has been widely circulated via e-mail and has had over 15 million hits on youtube. I am guessing that most people like its sentimentality and apparent happy ending. I think it tells an entirely different story.

In fact there is so much wrong with this portrayal of the blind that I hardly know where to start. Firstly, it suggests a natural association between begging and blindness, as if begging is all that the blind are good for. This may have been the case for some blind people in Scotland a couple of hundred years ago (and is still the case in some developing countries), but it is certainly not the case in the UK now. Blind people are no more likely to beg on the streets than anyone else. But this film insidiously suggests that being blind will limit your life-choices, career path and earning power. It will mean you can't make friends, have a family or buy a house. Blindness, it implies, will leave you lonely, poor and at the mercy of society's do-gooders.

This man's blindness has reduced him to a passive object of pity. All he can do is sit. He is not even given the power of knowledge. Unlike the sighted viewer he does not even know what has been written on his sign. For someone who believes in the power of words, the young advertising star is not very communicative. Not only does she rudely fail to introduce herself, obliging him to recognise her only by her shoes, she also refuses to read out the changed sign to him. She both undermines his autonomy by changing the sign without his permission, and also insults him by failing to properly answer the direct question he asks her. Maybe she thinks he is stupid as well as blind.

As well as assuming that the blind are prone to misery and helplessness, the film also suggests that being blind somehow limits your enjoyment of life. The incredibly lucrative new message, 'It's a beautiful day but I can't see it' reduces a person's appreciation of life to merely what they can see. True, the blind man cannot see the street which surrounds him, but he can feel, smell and hear it. Sight loss is not the tragedy this sign suggests. It means that people relate to the world in different ways, perhaps realising that the world is not quite as occulocentric as the sighted would have us believe.

It is a horrible irony that this film is almost entirely inaccessible to the blind. It relies completely on sight to tell its story, with only the sentimental music and sparse dialogue as aural clues to its atmosphere. It perhaps unsurprisingly does not come with audio description. Can you imagine how mortified the audio describer would be at having to describe these images of debasement and vulnerability for the blind?

I am pleased to see that I am not the only person who objects to this video. This blog post is a great example of its impact on the disabled community. And yet inexplicably this film is still in circulation, ensnaring more uncritical viewers in its pernicious lies of pity and pwerlessness.

The Ethics of the 'Tragedy' Approach

Since I started thinking critically about blindness, I have repeatedly argued in this blog against the widely held view that blindness, or indeed any disability, is a tragedy. I have become interested in the 'personal non-tragedy' approach to disability and in March 2013 I am organising a study day to explore issues around tragedy and disability.

I thought that seeing disability as a tragedy perpetuated society's view of the disabled (and thus disabled people's view of themselves) as inferior, somehow lesser people. In a post on Tina Nash - the woman ferociously blinded by her boyfriend Shane Jenkin in 2011 -  I noted how Tina herself resisted the media's attempts to assign the traditional disability labels of 'brave' and 'courageous' to her. I was trying to argue that this resistance demonstrates that disability is not inherently tragic and that Tina's refusal to see herself as a victim was empowering not just for her but also for other disabled people. 

I recently received a very angry response to my Tina Nash post from Maria Brody. Maria's comments, which I found shocking and hurtful, accused me of being more immoral, more evil, than Tina's attacker. Maria's argument is that by refusing to see disability as a tragedy, I undermine the severity of Jenkin's crime and make disabled people feel guilty for wanting to be 'whole' again. Her comments, as well as demonstrating the alarming pervasiveness of myths of blindness and disability amongst the general public, raise important questions about the ethics of my 'personal non-ttragedy' approach. Maria sent me her comments by e-mail and I include them in full below in italics, with my responses in bold.

You do realize that it is a mindset such as the one you describe that contributes to torturers like Shane Jenkin getting only six years in prison? After which he can happily go out again and pluck out someone else's eyes. Creating more blindness. More tragedy, yes.
I think your post is a massive insult to victims of violence.

I did not intend to insult anyone nor to belittle Jenkin's actions. He subjected Tina to a brutal and violent assault and should be punished for it. How Tina is living with her blindness is a completely separate issue. She is living her life in a way which shows that blindness is not a tragedy and does not signal the end of life as we know it. Are you suggesting that she should give up on her life, her children and her self-esteem so that perpetrators of violence receive longer sentences? Surely this would signify a further triumph for her torturer.

Rape is probably also best responded to by "laying back and enjoying it", according to your morals?

Rape, like assault, is a violent act inflicted on somebody against their will. As such it is reprehensible and wrong. My post does not suggest that Tina enjoyed her attack. It argues that once blinded, she adopted a positive attitude to her new way of being in the world.

It's all in the mind, there's no difference really between good or bad, it's the victim's own fault if she thinks blindness is a tragedy, if only she'll stop constructing herself as a victim she'll be just fine.

 

I do not blame anyone for thinking that blindness is a tragedy. After all we are constantly bombarded by this message in language, in the media, in film and in literature. My post on David Rathband's blinding reminds us that feelings of mourning and depression are extremely common when affected by sudden sight loss. But might blindness feel less tragic if Western civilisation stopped fetishizing the eyes, vision and the sense of sight?

Oh yeah, does it really make a difference whether you see your loved one's faces or not, or a sunset, or a tree, or the sky?

 

You are asking the wrong person. I really don't think it does make a difference. But then I didn't lose my sight suddenly like Tina and David so there are lots of things that I've never seen and never missed seeing.  My life doesn't feel empty because I've never seen them. Unlike most people, I've never seen sight as the most important of the senses. I use touch and smell extensively in my contact with the world.  

Or permanent darkness.

All the same, of course!

"Black is just another color, full of possibilities."

"Rape is just another form of sex, stop calling it a problem."

Why these parallels between rape and blindness? How do you think this makes blind people feel? 

Etc.

No.

You are the one acting blindly here,

 

This is an interesting turn of phrase. Do you see how even the metaphoric language we use constantly tells us that blindness is negative? 

 

 denying that reality can sometimes be horrific. And that evil does exist.

I am not denying that Tina suffered a violent and painful attack. But I am saying that she is refusing to let Jenkin's act ruin her life.

If you believe you are benefitting disabled people, and victims of violence, by denying their feelings and the hardships of their reality, think again.

I have had first-hand experience of the negative feelings having a disability can cause. Remember that I have been living with my blindness for 39 years. But I know now that these feelings are the product of society's negativisation of disability. This in turn is a result of an occulocentric society obsessed with conventional notions of beauty and perfection and with sight, vision and the eyes. Having a disability is often annoying, inconvenient, time-consuming and expensive. But it is not a tragedy.

Please.

Look again at what you wrote:

"It is significant that Tina rejects the epithets of 'courageous' and 'amazing' that the interviewer dangles in front of her. By doing so, Tina does much to demonstrate that blindness in itself is not a tragedy: rather, it is the sighted world's view of blindness which might be described as 'disabling'. If I described Tina as 'an inspiration' I would be undermining my own argument by buying into the 'disability as tragedy to be overcome' mindset. So I'll just say that hearing her voice on radio 4 this morning made me glad to know that she is there."

The last sentence must, judging from the preceding argumentation, mean: "hearing her voice on radio 4 this morning made me glad to know she is blind."

The last sentence means that I am glad that she is handling her blindness in a refreshingly positive way.

Really? That is disgusting.

 

And if this was not what you meant, what is it then making you so glad? Tina was "there" too when she had eyes, remember? - But that did not give you any thrill, did it?

True. But only because I had never heard of her before her blinding. I am not glad that Tina is blind. I am glad that she is showing other people who lose their sight suddenly that life can go on.

The real significance of Tina's rejection of the description "brave" is exactly what she is saying: She is just surviving. Praising her for bravery would in a way absolve the assailant who tortured her, making the assault "meaningful" or "OK", "not so bad after all". And Tina wants, of course, to hold on to the truth: to keep insisting that this was wrong, that this was entirely horrific and should not have happened to anyone. And that we should do our utmost to prevent similar evils from happening. To deny that is as great an insult as what he did to her.

I think we are saying the same thing here. I agree that what Jenkin did was horrific. But it would have been just as horrific - no more, no less -  if he had cut off her hands, her ears or her legs. By saying that his crime is worse because it led to blindness you are fetishizing the sense of sight and thus perpetuating the myth that says that gouging out the eyes is the most horrific punishment. Jenkin went for Tina's eyes because of society's fetishization of them. Without this privileging of the sense of sight, he might have turned his attention somewhere else.   

You, in my view, are trying to do to her mind, and everyone else's minds, what he did to her physically.

No, I am trying to do the opposite. I am trying to ask people to think again about blindness and the sighted world's understanding of it. I am trying to metaphorically open people's eyes.

One is doing disabled people no favor by denying reality and placing upon them the addition burden of guilt for still feeling deep down that they would rather be whole.

I agree. By constantly telling disabled people that they are somehow less than whole, society makes them yearn to be whole again. This creates a struggle between acceptance and self-loathing which can lead to depression or even suicide. But the burden of guilt for this lies not with disabled people but with those who constantly reinforce the 'disability as tragedy' myth, thus encouraging self-pity and immobilising the disabled in a stagnant victim culture.

It is one thing to keep a positive attitude to life in difficult circumstances - and an entirely different thing to blatantly lie about the difference between ability and disability.

I am not lying. I am questioning received wisdom and trying to go beyond superficial appearances.  

True, one can choose to use whatever one has to the best of one's abilities, and that is an inspiration to us all. But that does not mean that being disabled is not a tragedy.

Nor does it mean that it is a tragedy.

Do not deny Tina her own language of ghostliness and death. Blindness does have similarities with these conditions. You can describe your own life exactly as you like. But don't try to blind others to the truth of life. Perspective is part of reality, but not all of it.

I am not denying Tina her language or her feelings. I am celebrating her own description of her situation. It is completely understandable that Tina is in mourning for her sight. But this is the fault of a society which privileges sight over the other senses.

You are not helping, but committing a form of violence with this invasive morality of yours.

I am not a disability activist. I am an academic working on disability studies. No one is obliged to read this blog if it offends them.

That demon, Shane Jenkin, had at least a shred left in him of true morality - he said he expected to get 20 years for the gouging out of a woman's eyes. In other words, he knew he was guilty, and evil.

Whereas you, madam, try to deny both these facts.

No I don't. I agree that he is both guilty and evil.

My advice to you is to not let your mind become clouded by the present academic faith (as it really is more than a science) that language and perspective can change reality a 100 percent.

We can only hope to change the world by understanding how it works, by unpicking the myths and cliches which govern how people think.

It can't. And thank God for that, for if it could, there would be no place outside power, and no room for true love, which can only live by freedom.

Language is not an absolute, nor a magic stick which can make all your worries go away. The world is real after all. Your body, your emotions, your mind are realities beyond your representation of them. Other people are real too. And the tragedies that happen to them are real tragedies.

It is precisely because language is not an absolute that its use can be so insidious. Your own use of metaphors of blindness has shown how misuse of language can led to the confusion of myth and reality.


Here is a test whether I am right in saying that there is a real difference between being blind or seeing, or not:
You write that you are partially blind. Now, if a new technique was created which would give you perfect vision - would you use it or not?

This is a good question which I have thought about a lot. It is an academic question, a theoretical one really because there is no cure for coloboma and there never will be. But if a cure was found I would not use it. My reason for this is simple: the way I see is part of me. It has defined the way I think, behave anf feel since I was born. I cannot imagine myself without my blindness. If I suddenly regained my sight I think I would experience the kind of mourning that the sighted feel when they suddenly lose their sight. I bet you don't believe me. I bet you think that I am just saying this to further my argument. But you are wrong. I am proud of the way I look (in both senses). I never wish I could see perfectly. Sometimes I wonder if seeing better would make my life less complicated but I have never longed for sight and I'm certain that I would refuse a cure.



With regards, Maria.

Oh, and a PS: It is not "literature" which has taught us that "intentional blinding" - as you euphemistically rename this form of torture - is atrocious. What teaches us this is

1) personal experience with pain

2) compassion.  

We agree that intentional blinding is atrocious. But it is impossible to separate fiction and reality, or literature and life: Jenkin got the idea for this form of torture from a film he saw. This film, in turn, was probably inspired, either knowingly or unknowingly, by Western civilisation's fascination with intentional blinding, a fascination both nurtured by, and reflected in literature.

Introduction: Personal and Professional Blindness

This is a blog about blindness. It is about my experiences of my own partial blindness but it is also about my current research into French representations of blindness.

I have spent this week working at the library of the Association Valentin Hauy, 5, rue Duroc, Paris 75007. The library has an incredible collection of French nineteenth-century novels about blindness.

(This image shows me standing outside the AVH: 

it is the first ever picture of me and my cane)

As this project develops I will post my findings here. I will also post my experiences of being a partially blind person in a resolutely sighted - or ocularcentric - world.