Best and Most Beautiful Things

This image is the cover of the DVD: it is a shot of Michelle's legs waiting at a pedestrian crossing in the dark. Her white cane is also shown. She is wearing bright pink ballet pumps and mismatched knee-high socks.

In 2013 I was contacted about a crowd sourcing project to fund a documentary about a legally blind student graduating from Perkins School for the Blind. I was pleased to make a donation and a few days ago I received my Kickstarter reward: a free download of Best and Most Beautiful Things. The film, which was released to much critical acclaim, aired on PBS yesterday and is now available to buy as an iTunes download or a DVD with Audio Description. 

Before I watched the film, I was worried that it would be yet another sentimental, 'triumph over tragedy' story about a blind girl overcoming adversity. But knowing that it won 'Best in Fest' at the 2016 International Disability Film Festival 'Superfest' reassured me that I was about to watch a creative and critical depiction of blindness.

'Best and Most Beautiful Things' is indeed a thought-provoking film about blindness. But rather than trying to teach its audience about life with blindness, the film simply shows Michelle going about her daily life. This is a hugely effective way of sharing Michelle's experience without depicting her as victim, object or other. We see her magnifying text on her computer, holding print close to her face and using her white cane. We also see her roller-skating, singing, shopping, getting dressed and skyping. Blindness is part of Michelle's normal. So as we watch the film it becomes part of ours. The film's cinematography helps us share Michelle's way of seeing. Extreme close-ups replicate Michelle's proximity with everything she sees whilst out-of-focus, decentred or jumpy shots echo the world beyond Michelle's field of vision. There are also moments which remind us of the disadvantages and advantages of blindness. I have often experienced Michelle's tearful frustration when fruitlessly searching for a lost object. But on the other hand, her karaoke singing is made more beautiful and more fluent because she is obliged to memorise the lyrics of every song she sings.

This still from the film shows Michelle colouring in a large home-made poster which says 'Unlearning Normal!' in rainbow letters.

In 'Best and Most Beautiful Things' Michelle urges us to 'unlearn normal'. The film shows Michelle's refusal to conform to any of the stereotypes her parents, teachers and acquaintances might have once associated with blindness. Her provocative re-appropriation of the myth of the infantile blind girl is particularly interesting. She challenges some people's tendency to overprotect or talk down to blind people, particularly blind women, by both her proud love of dolls and her discovery and celebration of submissive BDSM age-play. Michelle's sex-positive, non-binary stance is a crucial part of the film's challenge to normal. As the director Garrett Zevgetis puts it in a Q and A for PBS:

Our collective ideas about “normal” can be downright dangerous and thus must consistently be challenged. #HackNormal: The most dangerous and deep rooted normality might be hegemonic masculinity.

We all have a tendency to make assumptions about other people based on our own preconceptions. 'Best and Most Beautiful Things' urges us to rethink how we see others. It is a powerful, touching, yet resolutely unsentimental call for a more tolerant, imaginative and creative society where everyone is valued for who they are.

Watch it.

Book Review: What is Visible by Kimberly Elkins

This fascinating and enthralling novel is a fictional (auto)biography of Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind American to be taught to communicate using the manual alphabet. Bridgman, who was educated at the Perkins School for the Blind by Samuel Gridley Howe, is now much less well-known than her more famous - and more photogenic- successor Helen Keller, but in mid-nineteenth-century America, Bridgman was one of the most celebrated women of her day.

As the book's 'Afterword' demonstrates, Elkins is a careful and respectful researcher who has used her detailed knowledge of both Laura's life and the wider historical context to recreate one version of Laura's 'most fascinating and complex inner life'. The novel's prose brings Bridgman to life in ways which are both touching and intriguing. Throughout the book, we gain a real sense of what Laura might have been like through the passages written in her own voice which express inner thoughts, feelings and desires which she might have kept from those around her. The novel's readability comes from Laura's complex, persuasive and compelling narrative style: she is at once both astonishingly naive and startlingly perceptive; deeply expressive yet stubbornly secretive.

Elkins's treatment of Laura's sexuality is a particularly intriguing element of the novel. Female sexuality was a taboo subject in Victorian America and many people still struggle to imagine disabled people with full and active sex lives. Rather than avoiding references to sex, Elkins celebrates Laura's uninhibited and unorthodox responses both to her own body and to the bodies of the people around her.

Laura's intimate first-person narrative alternates with the thoughts, letters and journals of the main people in her life - Gridley Howe, his wife Julia and Laura's teacher Sarah - to create a multi-layered narrative in which the reader is often shown several versions of the same event and asked to make sense of them. Through these other characters' chapters we realise that sightedness does not necessarily lead to insight and that blindness can be moral, emotional and political as well as physical. It would have been very easy for Elkins to fall into the trap of portraying Laura as a 'blind seer' (much like Victor Hugo's Dea) who paradoxically understands more than the metaphorically 'blind' sighted characters. Instead, Elkins uses her multi-perspectival narrative to show that no-one can truly know themselves or be known by others. Knowledge, like sight, is over-rated and misunderstood. We are never really visible.

As well as providing an enthralling tale of several interwoven lives, this novel also offers an insight into the political and religious tensions raging in mid-nineteenth-century America. Laura was used as a pawn by several factions and through both her responses and the thoughts of the other characters, we gain a real sense of the issues surrounding women's suffrage and emancipation, the abolition of slavery and the racial tensions which led to the American Civil War.

Bridgman was not only deaf and blind, she also had no sense of taste or smell. Elkins's focus on Laura's sense of touch can be read as a celebration of the tactile which emphasises that the absence of the other senses does not necessarily lead to a less-full existence. Indeed, Elkins's novel does an excellent job of refuting the 'blindness as tragedy' myth which circulated in Laura's time (as it still does today). Whilst the novel is full of characters who pity Laura, she never sees her blindness as a tragedy. She is sensuous and passionate, always wanting to experience more of life. If she is disabled, it is by her guardians and teachers whose words reveal how they sometimes see her as less than human - she is variously a burden; an embarrassment; a trophy; something 'special', fragile or volatile; a child to be protected; an animal to be tamed. What we see, from her own words, is an intelligent and responsible woman who is just as much of a person as those who both limit and judge her.

Above all, What is Visible raises important questions about how both non-disabled people and disabled people might relate to questions of pity, dependency and trust. As such it resonates with current debates around independent living, care-giving and the place and status of disability in society.

The Taboo of Blindness

Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth Century France

(Oxford: Legenda, 2013)

(Cover image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London)

When I was a child, blindness was a taboo subject in our house. We never mentioned the word if we could help it and I remember a feeling of icy awkwardness descending if we ever encountered references to blindness or the blind on television. With the exception of The Little House on the Prairie I don't remember being read any books with blind characters in them and I suspect that my mum would rather not have read me the blindness episodes in Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. When we had to talk about what I could and could not see, I referred simply to 'my eyes'. When asked, I might say that I was 'half-blind' or 'registered blind' (in fact I was quite proud of being 'different' or 'special' sometimes) but I did not see myself as 'blind'. This was why I would not carry a white cane and hated 'mobility training' with a vengeance.

It was this refusal, both by me and by those around me, to address my blindness directly which led to my ferocious desire to 'pass' as a sighted person and deny my blind identity. The taboo status of 'blindness' made it a negative notion which I could not relate to my own reality. But it was also this negativity which surrounded 'blindness', a negativity learnt from prevailing societal attitudes to it, which rendered it taboo in the first place. Rather than admitting that I was blind, it felt easier to ignore it and hope others would do the same. It is only in the last eighteen months or so that I have been able to happily embrace my blind identity, an identity which now sits in a sometimes easy, sometimes conflictual, but always interesting relationship with my sighted self.

When I started thinking about how taboo aspects of bodily reality such as female sexual desire, illness, sado-masochism, disability, impotence and incest are represented in nineteenth-century French texts, I had no idea that this project would lead to my own personal interrogation of the taboo on blindness. But in my book, Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-Century France, published this month, I demonstrate that it is only by engaging with potentially difficult subjects that we can rid them of the negativity which surrounds them. As I argue in my Conclusion:  

'The taboo bodies which this study has uncovered are crucially important because they invite us to look again at our own misconceptions of what makes the body normal, beautiful, or perfect. Like the social model of disability, they urge us to rethink our understanding of how bodies relate to the world. [...] Exposure to the taboo is a necessary, though not always a comfortable, part of becoming an engaged and insightful reader. By discovering the form and function of the taboo bodies hidden at the text's heart, the reader is finally free to question his or her own misconceptions and thus begin to relate to bodies of any kind in new and enlightened ways.'