Blindness/sightedness: Disability studies and the defiance of di-vision

AUTHOR(S)

Ben Whitburn, Rod Michalko

PUBLICATION DATE

01-01-2020

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 Blindness/sightedness: Disability studies and the defiance of di-vision

Citation of the final chapter:

Whitburn, Benjamin and Michalko, Rod 2019, Blindness/sightedness: Disability studies and the
defiance of di-vision. In Watson, Nick and Vehmaas, Simo (ed), Routledge handbook of disability
studies, Routledge, New York, N.Y., pp.219-233.

This is the accepted manuscript of a chapter published by Routledge in The Routledge handbook of
disability studies in 2019, available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429430817

©2020, the authors

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 16 BLINDNESS/SIGHTEDNESS Disability studies and the defiance of
di-vision
Ben Whitburn and Rod Michalko

Introduction

Though a generally easy-to-define category of impairment, blindness, or vision impairment, is

uniquely positioned socially, culturally, politically and theoretically. Dichotomies persist between
the ways that vision impairment is embodied and culturally understood, and how social services
including education, employment and welfare are distributed to people marked with its
diagnostic brand. Ableist notions have a unique impact on concepts of vision, and thus on
blindness, to which disability studies scholarship must respond. Attentive to these complexities,
this chapter explores the potential for disability studies to counter the ongoing marginalisation of
people living with vision impairment by interrogating ocular-centric and ocular-normative
representations of blindness (Bolt 2005; Jay 1991; Jenks 1995; Levin 1997). These concepts
refer to the propensity of dominant epistemological assumptions about sightlessness to reify
totalising notions of need that are complicit in dividing blind people from the mainstream
population in seemingly innocuous and munificent ways. Following Titchkosky (2009), how
disability generally has been conceived in the scientific and social scientific literature is at least
partly responsible for this rendering. It is in this way that the limitations imposed on people with
vision impairment in their (our) day-to-day lives are perpetuated. Moving away from comfortable
yet totalising definitions of blindness and sightedness, we draw instead on various theoretical
strings in critical disability studies to examine the constitutive influence of linguistic conventions,
and to emphasise relationalities – interdependent relationships between people with vision
impairment and others, technology, animals and other non-human entities.

In this chapter we move gingerly – as people with vision impairment might be expected to do –
through three sections. In the first section, we consider dominant ways of being (ontologies) fully
sighted or otherwise, and ways of knowing (epistemologies) vision impairment and sightedness
through empiricism – the theory of knowledge production that privileges sensory experience. In
the second section, we examine developments in disability studies that have emerged over the
years in so far as they relate to blindness. These include the consideration of how religious,
medical, social and critical conceptualisations of disability relate to vision impairment. This
discussion leads us to consider both the limitations and potential openings for disability studies
to defy marginalisation for people with vision
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impairment. We conclude the discussion in the third section by drawing on critical theoretical
strings to explore everyday practices such as employment and welfare, physical orientation and
travel, which in turn develops a type of knowledge production that depicts the limitations of
visual ableism through an attentiveness to shared responsibility of sightedness and blindness.
Di-visions in knowledge
Before proceeding further, we make a crucial point, gesturing insistently at the subtitle of this
chapter. The relation between being, knowing and seeing is neither innocuous nor innocent.
Conventional empiricism, which dominates Western philosophical approaches to knowledge,
privileges a particular fixed way of conceptualising the world through the senses, foremost
among them sightedness. Empiricism follows a single guiding principle: nihil in intellectu nisi
prius in sensu (‘nothing in the intellect unless first in sense’), a radical concept for its time that
diverges from rationalism.
In An Essay on Human Understanding, seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke
([1706] 1991) attended to a problem of the senses posed by what Schillmeier (2006: 472) called
‘the blind figure and the “labour of human knowledge'". For Locke, particular sensations are
detected through one or more of the senses, such as colour through the eyes, sound through
hearing, and so forth. Locke conceived of primary and secondary qualities in nature. Whereas
sightedness is a primary quality of independent and intrinsic principles from which reactions
originate, secondary qualities, such as words and sounds, produce sensations that are external
to people. Invoking the figure of a blind man, Locke’s steadfast conviction was that absence of
sight, and therefore of ideas about colour and light, is evidence of the significance of full sensual
experience. Unlike a sighted person, a person bereft of sight is primarily sequestered from
knowledge and is subsequently dependent on secondary qualities of descriptors — words and
touch. Schillmeier describes Locke’s thesis on empiricism as a doctrine of knowledge wherein
‘Sight, light and ideas are in perfect communication and their relation produces faultless
knowledge in a smooth, effortless and immaterial process, as if there were no gap between the
thing perceived and the thing understood’ (ibid.: 474). In making these claims, Locke makes a
number of assumptions that have gone on to shape modern epistemological politics about
blindness and sightedness that resonate today.
Locke recognised that sightedness is a provisional sense: blindness could befall someone, or
they could be restored to light. To this end, invoking the blind figure to substantiate his empiricist
will to knowledge, Locke pays particular attention to the account of an adventitiously blind
person, as well as to the famous Molyneux problem — stories that in their recounting present
polar opposite circumstances. The adventitiously blind person loses his sight after some years
of seeing, and Molyneux, who was himself married to an adventitiously blind woman,
questioned whether or not a person with vision impairment who had their vision restored would
immediately be able to recognise shapes by sight. Locke posited that the person’s sightlessness
would constrict their knowledge, irrespective of the condition with which they commenced
(sightedness or blindness), on account of the superiority of learning through the primary quality
sense of sight. The fact that medical science has since the seventeenth century continued to
attempt the preservation of eyesight for any number of vision conditions ensures that the ethical
question posed in Molyneux’s problem is continually retested (Kleege 2010; Schillmeier 2006).
More important to our discussion, however, is the epistemological politics for blind and sighted
people that emerge from Locke’s essay, on account of its combined physiological and social
implications. Both Kleege (2010) and Schillmeier (2006) insist that Locke’s empirical
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project on blindness not only privileges visual perception, but also privileges sightedness as an
authority to speak of blindness experiences. Kleege wonders why the experiences of
Molyneux’s blind wife had not been foregrounded in his problem. Schillmeier too rejects the
limited notions of visual and touch perception that Locke discusses in his essay from which such
lasting impressions of blindness have emerged. That only less than 10 per cent of people
marked legally blind have no visual perception (Bolt 2005) seems to evade the seventeenth-
century theorists in favour of stereotypes, or what Kleege (2006: 522) refers to as ‘the
hypothetical blind man’ whose experience is born out of clinical experimentation under artificial
conditions. The foundations of knowledge about blindness, then, emerge from an understanding
that ‘facts speak for themselves’ — that objective, systematic experiments depose interpretive
bias through neutral observation that is not tainted by linguistic and cultural mediation leading to
contamination. This arises even though the philosophy of science has refuted the objectivity of
data experimentation (St. Pierre 2016; Kuhn 1962).
The conclusion that Locke reaches excludes the complexities of blind experience in favour of
external expertise. A host of medical, psychological and pedagogical understandings both
explain what it means to live with vision impairment and provide access to citizenship. The
domination of the discussion of sight rather than blindness frames it above all as a problem of
sensory absence based on and reifying stereotypes. As Schillmeier (2006: 479) says, ‘blindness
is made present by functionally divided perspectives (di-visions as it were) of medical and
professional care, knowledge and expertise on an individual deficiency of vision’. We will return
to these di-visions, to which disability studies must respond defiantly in order to substantiate its
contribution to knowledge, later in the chapter. For now, let us consider the transdisciplinary
field of disability studies and its engagements with vision impairment.
Disability studies and vision impairment
Routine conceptions of vision impairment have much in common with scholarly incursions into
disability, or what we refer to here as disability studies, as a consequence of deeply imbedded
societal values that are difficult to temper, perhaps related to the cultural values grounding
Locke’s empiricist orientation (Goodley et al. 2012). Disability studies is a discipline of academic
research and associated professional practice that emerged in the 1970s across many Western
European and North American countries (Goodley 2013; Kristiansen et al. 2009; Meekosha and
Shuttleworth 2009; Oliver 2009; Schillmeier 2006; Shakespeare 2013). Similar work that sits
beneath the banner of disability studies has emerged more recently in countries of the global
south (Grech 2009; Meekosha 2011; Nguyen 2018) that contextualises barriers to inclusion in
developing settings. Disability studies, in conjunction with disability activism, developed out of a
need to challenge the cultural, structural, economic and material barriers that prevent people
living with impairments from participating equitably. A host of national and pan-national
responses to disability have been mobilised through these developments, including the
International Year of Disabled People in 1981, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights
of Persons with Disabilities (2006), which have raised disability as a global human rights issue
(Gill and Schulund-Vials 2014). Disability studies has also had an effect at a more practical level
in many international contexts: training and education organisations draw on disability studies
directly, as do social policy, legislative discourses and professional practice in some fields
(Goodley 2013; Tremain 2015).
Contemporary disability studies, both in minority world and in majority world countries, engages
with diverse theoretical resources to develop nuanced conceptual responses to marginalisation.
The shift towards theory has demarcated disability studies from what might now
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be understood as critical disability studies (Goodley 2013; Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009;
Shildrick 2012; Tremain 2015) which opens up opportunities to learn how disability coincides
with any number of intersectional markers of difference, including embodiment and cultural
mediation, when thinking about and addressing the challenge of inclusion. According to
Goodley,
If one was to compare the contemporary state of critical disability
studies with disability studies from the last century, one would have to
conclude that much has changed — not least — in terms of the
growing theoretical confidence of this transdisciplinary community.
(2013: 642)
While a critical approach to disability studies has come in for some contestation for being too far
removed from material experiences of marginalisation in favour of the incitement to theory
(Barnes 2012; Shakespeare 2013; Vehmas and Watson 2014; Watson 2012), there are three
principal conceptual positions that underpin disability scholarship that lead to the contemporary
moment: the moral, individual/medical, and the social models. These three positions of disability
align with three vision impairment-specific conceptualisations of the moral, the psychological
and the learned explanations. We will undertake a reading of these three comparable patterns
through a discussion of vision impairment scholarship specifically before considering some of
the innovations afforded through the critical turn.
The moral explanation
Moral conceptualisations of disability, or what Wheatley calls the ‘religious model’ (2010: 65),
developed from pious texts such as the Bible, and as Kristiansen et al. write, it formed the
‘generally prevalent view in antiquity’ (2009: 2). While Barnes (1997) suggests that infanticide
was generally inflicted on babies born with disabilities in ancient Greek times, the general
premise of a moralist position on disability is that the presence of impairment is evidence of the
moral failings of an individual, or his or her family. Those who acquire an impairment later in life
are in receipt of punishment for similar sins of spirituality. Of significance to religion is a visible
division, namely that impairment is imposed on the individual or their family, and is made
observable in its physicality (Stiker 1999: 29). The provisional aspect of vision impairment is
cited in the New Testament of the Bible as either reward or punishment, which positions Jesus
as a miraculous and divine healer as he cures a man of blindness who he deems worthy of sight
(Wheatley 2010). That religion was capable of this type of control evidences a certain
antecedence to the latter medical vs social model debates, in which impairment and disability
are incongruent concepts of individualisation and acculturation. For Wheatley, both the social
model and the religious model share analogous concerns in that through religion, spiritual health
took precedence over medical intervention, which concerned a person’s moral development
(social community) over their individualised medical needs.
With specific regard to vision impairment, blindness features in the ancient Greek ‘culture of
light’ at the limits of social and cultural boundaries, although paradoxically, vision-impaired
people are also celebrated for having superior sight (Bernidaki 1990). ‘For the Greeks, the blind
figure lives within a noncomprehensible realm of “darkness” that is and is not human’
(Schillmeier 2006: 472). The Greek myth of Oedipus appeals to the religious model of vision
impairment in its depiction of blinding as punishment. Oedipus kills his father and marries his
mother, and upon realising his slip in familial judgement, gouges out
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his own eyes. If we believe Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex, Oedipus’s
fate resonates with us because it highlights sexual desires and subsequent conflicts that reside
in us subconsciously.
The paradox in Oedipus’s tale is that blindness is portrayed as a fate worse than death
(Bernidaki 1990; Kleege 1999). Kleege argues that perhaps unlike in the case of punishment by
death, the effects of making a sinner blind as retribution indelibly recasts the lives of everyone
around the blinded person in destructive ways. By association, ‘blindness inverts, perverts, or
thwarts all human relationships’ (1999: 71). While this seems unlikely for the citizenry,
Bernidaki, in contrast, demonstrates that another effect of blindness is to become a supreme
soothsayer. In any case, a lingering legacy of religious and moral contributions to knowledge on
vision impairment is what Scott (1969) calls common-sense explanations —folkloric
representations wherein vision-impaired people possess personalities and psychologies that set
them apart from sighted people. In line with the Greek paradox of darkness and supremacy both
being inherent to the condition of vision impairment, and also with John Locke’s empiricist
values of sensual experience, the world that people with such afflictions supposedly inhabit is
less cluttered with knowledge, therefore providing the benefit of spiritual pre-eminence.
According to Scott,
This world, which is believed to be less gross and materialistic than
our own, is said to be infused with a spirituality that gives its
inhabitants a peculiar purity and innocence of mind. Those who live in
the world of the blind are believed capable of experiencing unique
inner feelings and rising to aesthetic heights that are beyond the
abilities of all but the most unusual of sighted men.
(Ibid.: 4)
Living, as we do, in a world not set aside from sighted individuals, it seems simplistic to offer
such an explanation of blindness, let alone to overcome the contradictory dualisms that a moral
position on disability implies.
The medical/individual/psychological explanation
A therapeutic response to what is conceived of as a biological deficiency has, since the
seventeenth century, given rise to that which has often been described as the medical,
individual or personal tragedy model of disability (Oliver 2009). The ascendancy of medical
practice that has emerged from this time positioned impairment as an objectionable condition
that could and should be ameliorated. The identity of the person with an impairment thus moved
from a moral wrong to an individual one. As Kristiansen et al. write, ‘disability has been
explained by scientific methods, and reduced to an individual’s physiological or mental
deficiencies’ (2009: 4). To some extent we have already visited the legacy of the medical model
in our discussion of Locke, wherein essentialist, fixed understandings of impairment preface any
account made possible by people with disabilities, and the expertise of people without
impairments takes a heightened meaning over the experiences of those living with them.
That medical development began to find restorative solutions to impairing conditions is not in
and of itself the sole cause for alarm (Shakespeare 2013). For Barnes (1997) and Oliver (2009),
the medical model produced material conditions that led to the segregation of people with
disabilities from Western societies, with specific reference to the rise of industrial capitalism.
People with impairments, who were believed to be unable to contribute to capital
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growth, were institutionalised under a regime of either physical or discursive powers, such as
mental institutions (physical) or disability employment (discursive). To this end, Barnes cites
Wolfensberger (1989) in his explanation of service industries in the United States and the
United Kingdom which function to segregate the lesser valued person in institutions to ensure
the employment of others. For these authors, the medical model and its outward effects has
become a hegemonic ideology, one that continues to have deleterious effects.
Following the ideas of Barnes (1997) and Oliver (2009) with reference to vision impairment, the
medical diagnostic apparatus has responded to both impairing conditions of blindness, and the
psychological effects of sight loss. While the former manifests itself in simple terms of surgical
and general practice responses to vision loss, such as cataract removal operations or glaucoma
prevention testing, the latter is based on psychological rehabilitative reactions to support the
individual to come to terms with the onset of his or her impairment. A common response to sight
loss, from this perspective, is a reduction in mental health and social connectedness, to which
psychological strategies can respond (Thurston 2010; Thurston et al. 2010). According to Scott,
a psychological explanation of vision impairment assumes a fixed set of criteria, namely ‘the
psychological reactions that all blind people have to becoming blind, and the enduring impact of
the condition upon basic components of personality’ (1969: 6). The psychological orientation
suggests that if these reactions are not managed, they can manifest in shock, grief and,
apparently, enduring depression. This behavioural approach to vision impairment thus relies
heavily on concepts of adjustment: the capacity to adapt to impaired sight and to draw on other
senses to compensate for the lack will lead to increased — or retrieved — independence.
Accordingly, much is made in the blindness literature about the psychological development of
self-esteem and self-concepts (Scott 1969; Thurston et al. 2010; Tuttle and Tuttle 2004).
Additional developments emerging from the medical dominance of vision impairment are special
educational services, and special employment ‘work for the blind’ initiatives. As a consequence
of these developments, the literature emerging from a medical and psychological response to
vision impairment might be characterised as practice-based rehabilitative studies. Specialist
schools for the blind have been in existence in many countries since the third century (Davis
1995) and employment services have also had a long historical hold on the vocational lives of
people with vision impairment upon their transition from special schools (Scott 1969). However
specialist schooling services might have been perceived originally, with the increase in
international legislation mandating inclusive opportunities, their role has of late diminished into
that of support to mainstream systems. Furthermore, ‘work for the blind’ initiatives have tended
to close down. In circumstances in which these services continue to exist, much is often made
of their capacity to offer choices to people with vision impairment and their families — a claim
that can lead to pejorative results.
The social and learned explanation
The social model of disability contrasts sharply with the medical perception, as articulated by
Kristiansen et al: ‘disability is a social problem that should be dealt with through social
interventions, not an individual problem that is to be dealt with through medical interventions’
(2009: 2). Central to the social model are two points. First, people living with impairments were
core to its development, a detail that strengthens its significance to disability politics. Second,
the principal contention of the social model is that there are a number of conditions that prevent
people with impairments from accessing mainstream structures, such as schooling and
employment. These material barriers are of particular importance to the social model, as
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stated in the Fundamental Principles of Disability published by the Union of the Physically
Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS 1976, quoted in Oliver 2009: 42):
[T]he particular form of poverty principally associated with physical
impairment is caused by our exclusion from the ability to earn an
income on a par with our ablebodied peers, due to the way
employment is organised. This exclusion is linked with our exclusion
from participating in the social activities and provisions that make
general employment possible.
One characteristic of the social model is that it makes a distinction between the terms
impairment and disability, and attempts to define them precisely. Whereas an impairment is
embodied — a person might be physically, psychosocially, intellectually or sensorially impaired
— disability refers to the social and material barriers that are experienced on account of
inappropriate responses by social communities towards impairment. The late Mike Oliver, who
was centrally involved in the development of the social model, signals the importance of this
distinction: ‘this turned the understanding of disability completely on its head by arguing that it
was not impairment that was the main cause of the social exclusion of disabled people but the
way society responded to people with impairments’ (2009: 43).
The social model has gathered much steam internationally. It informs the Convention (2006)
and may have influenced a suite of UN policy initiatives into disability inclusion in education.
Country-specific responses to disability and education such as in England (Rieser 2008) and
member states of the European Union (European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive
Education 2018) generally cite the social model as underpinning principles to inclusion. The
social model also sets the theoretical agenda of many disability activist organisations throughout
the world, such as Disabled Peoples’ International (2012) and the World Blind Union (2014).
To draw on a position of vision impairment made possible through the social model, as does
Bolt (2005), is to recognise that disability manifests itself through preconceived assumptions of
visual necessity over alternative ways of engaging with ones’ social and material surroundings.
Therefore, under these conditions, what marginalises a person with impaired vision are the
instances wherein social reforms could counter needless obstacles to access. Bolt develops this
argument through a series of examples, including the marginalisation meted out to a person
with vision impairment whose financial institution provides account details only in print;
restaurants that bar guide dog users from entering their premises; home owners and local
councils that fail to maintain overhanging obstacles not detectable with white canes; and
retailers who neglect to provide sighted support. For Bolt, these examples are suggestions
among innumerable others that pertain to employment, housing, transportation, education,
training and leisure — obstacles that may not afflict people who live with their vision intact.
While a social model explanation of blindness seems plausible, not least with regard to the
decline of disabling conditions of text accessibility through technological advancements
(Whitburn 2017), missing from this conceptualisation is a consideration of the combined ways
that impaired vision and its social consequences are experienced by individuals. That is, a strict
materialist stance neglects to account for the potential ways that people with vision impairment
are influenced, either affirmatively or adversely, through both their biological circumstances and
their social conditions. For Scott (1969), the disability of blindness is a learned social role, one
that is made conceivable not least through intervention programmes such as schools and work
for the blind. ‘Blind men [sic] are made, and by the same processes of socialization that have
made us all’ (ibid.: 14). Despite their rhetorical adherence to the social model, blindness
agencies are complicit in portraying blindness as a pitiable condition — a deeply
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contradictory position that visits the moral, charitable and medical conceptualisations of vision
impairment simultaneously (Bolt 2016).
Although resonant of Wolfensberger’s (1989) warning about the dividing practices of particular
human services, important to the argument contextualised to the social model over its medical
precursor is the emphasis on learned social roles. All people who live with the unique
manifestations of blindness learn to live with their circumstances in very specific and diverse
ways. These can transcend simultaneous and incongruous positions of denial in response to
personal anxieties and those perceived by others as slowness, stupidity and fear. French
(1993), who writes from her perspective of growing up as a child with vision impairment in the
UK, provides an instructive account of her own perceived responsibility to negate the impact of
her condition:
By denying the reality of my impairment and disability I protected
myself from the anxiety, disapproval, frustration and disappointment
of the adults in my life. I denied my impairment and disability in
response to their denial, which was often motivated by a benign
attempt to integrate me in a world which they perceived as fixed. My
denial of impairment and disability was thus not a psychopathological
reaction, but a sensible and rational response to the peculiar situation
I was in.
(Ibid.: 93)
French demonstrates that vision impairment and disability do not form two sides of a dualistic
coin. Instead, any conceptualisation of disability is a complex form of consciousness (Titchkosky
2011) that is socially driven. For reasons such as these, and undoubtedly countless others, the
social model of disability, like the religious and medical explanations before it, lacks conviction
against the binds that prevent people with impaired vision from gaining full citizenship. A more
critical position must acknowledge some of the complexities that we raise here, in order to carry
more conceptual strength. We turn to some of these ideas in the following sections.
Critical explanations
Despite the theoretical positions taken both from within and outside disability studies,
particularly the latter materialist approaches, people with vision impairment continue to inhabit
the fringes of the societies in which they live. Media reports point out that blind people are
reportedly five times less likely to gain paid employment than people without impaired vision,
and twice less likely than people with other types of impairment (Cullen 2011). At the same time,
although the social model might explain ocular-centric nuances of customs that can be
exclusionary for people with vision impairment such as making eye contact, and the emphasis
on facial expressions and body language (Bolt 2005), these conventions seem unlikely to be
interrupted through materialist critique alone. Indeed, not knowing what eye contact is let alone
how to manipulate this form of communication can be the cause of considerable anxiety for
people with impaired vision. As Kleege writes, ‘Of all the normal visual experiences that sighted
people take for granted, the one I find most confusing is eye contact. I could live with this
confusion except that sometimes eye contact seems a matter of life and death’ (1999: 122). If
employment is contingent upon eye contact, which in some cases it probably is, Kleege’s point
is well founded.
Returning to Locke’s (1991) empiricism, a fissure has emerged in the binary between a medical
and individual model (primary qualities) understanding on the one hand, and a social
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model depiction (secondary qualities) on the other. Locke’s thesis was to distinguish between
primary and secondary qualities, giving superiority to experiences generated through the
primary, visual sense over powers of sensations that are external to the body. Although
disability studies via the social model may have been successful in overturning an emphasis on
primary qualities in favour of secondary ones, this reversal does little to move beyond modernist
readings of the epistemological politics of blindness (Schillmeier 2006). Other contributions to
disability scholarship, such as the affirmation model (Swain and French 2000),
phenomenological disability studies (Kleege 1999; Michalko 1999; Titchkosky 2009), feminist
disability studies (French 1993; Garland-Thomson 2005; Morris 1992), postconventional
perspectives (Shildrick 2012), and critical realism (Kristiansen et al. 2009; Shakespeare 2013;
Vehmas and Watson 2014; Watson 2012) build on social model considerations. Yet what these
diverse approaches have in common is their re-emphasis on the body, impairment and the
embodiment of impairment (see Goodley 2013; Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009).
The turn towards the corporeality of impairment assumes a critical perspective, the scholarship
of which critiques the forces at work that perpetuate exclusion for people with disabilities,
namely the attributes of personhood that are valued above all others in a modernist, neoliberal
imaginary. These include autonomy, agency, rationality and control over one’s own body —
most notably through individual distinctions between the self and the other (Goodley 2013;
Shildrick 2012). Critical disability studies therefore goes beyond preceding models of critique
that explore both sides of any di-visions (Schillmeier 2006) by embracing the ontological turn
(St. Pierre 2016). This transformed concentration, as Shildrick writes, ‘challenges every one of
us to rethink the relations between disabled and non-disabled designations — not just ethically
as has long been the demand, but ontologically, right at the heart of the whole question of self
and other’ (2012: 30). As such, critical disability studies sets the stage for ‘questions of
embodiment, identity and agency as they affect all living beings’ (ibid.: 30) — to which we would
add non-human beings both living and non-living, such as language, technology, animals, the
environment and communities.
It seems necessary, to us, to concentrate on collective understandings of vision impairment in
order to counter the persistent barriers to conceptual inclusiveness for people living with it. This
demands that we consider how blindness informs sightedness — how people, both sighted and
with impaired vision, interact with matter (and how matter interacts with people), language,
resources, education, employment and mobility. Responding explicitly to this provocation is
important because it invites us to consider what sort of knowledge constitutes the positioning of
vision impairment and people, animals and things living in and through it, and then in what ways
this might be defied through scholarly practice that demonstrates its deleterious effects.
Following Shildrick, the purpose of this approach is not to supplant extant theoretical bases of
disability studies, but to respond to embodied, social, cultural, political and discursive
understandings of blindness across various theatres of life, and to ‘maximize the ways in which
we can confidently develop our own agenda for [critical disability studies]’ (2012: 31).
Significantly, a critical disability studies approach to studying vision impairment acknowledges
that universal categorisation and theorisation is implausible. The limitations imposed by
impaired vision are dependent on a variety of intersectional and embodied differences, such as
ethnicity, culture and sex. Vision impairment, unlike the way in which Locke conceived it, is itself
also variable — fluid conditions of embodiment (causes of vision impairment) interact with any
number of ambient circumstances (light, colour, wind, rain, tactile) and social conditions that
ensure continual vagaries of conceptual stability.
An approach to disability studies that picks up on this avenue of inquiry draws directly on
everyday practices of people with impaired vision. A richly demonstrative body of scholarship
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has emerged from the critical turn in which the embodiment of blindness is explored. This
exploration emphasises relational aspects and rejects the di-vision that has dominated the
epistemological politics of vision impairment (Schillmeier 2006). Valuable to this work, as
Schillmeier notes, is the purposeful way in which it exemplifies that ‘blindness does not render
itself easily to the realm of the legacy of epistemological politics but name[s] alternatives to it’
(ibid.: 481). By providing ‘critical reflection or reflexivity to revisit ideas that we might have taken
for granted’ (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2016: 2), limitations previously associated with
blindness can be reframed. We explore in the following sections how we come to know
blindness, how we conceptualise it in language, and how as an embodied phenomenon it
moves us to emphasise relations with other people, animals and technology. It is in these three
concerns that we anticipate disability studies scholarship will engage more purposefully with
blindness as the field develops.
We all come to know blindness and sightedness
Whether fully or partially sighted, congenitally or adventitiously blind, each person comes to
know blindness in particular ways. The onset of impaired vision confers onto a person a
complexity that Michalko calls an ‘inescapable epistemic contingency’ (2001: 356), which
initiates a lifetime of continual negotiation. In this sense negotiation is necessarily linked to
disclosure, accessibility, navigation, guidance and reassurance, and its inevitability arises from
the cultural phenomenon that blindness is extraordinary in relation to the conventional order of
things. While this detail seems all but fixed, negotiation is contextually and socially contingent.
Take, for example, the necessity to disclose one’s disability as an integral aspect of one’s
everyday occupation, as Kleege is obliged to do as part of her role as a university educator
when about to take a class:
I tell the class, ‘I am legally blind’. There is a pause, a collective
intake of breath. I feel them look away uncertainly and then look
back. After all, I just said I couldn’t see. Or did I? I had managed to
get in there all on my own — no cane, no dog, none of the usual
trappings of blindness.
(1999: 9)
These trappings of blindness to which Kleege refers, but does not rely upon, might precede a
person, thus announcing an anomaly of the teacher’s embodiment, and possibly disrupting the
normative order of teaching and learning. The epistemic contingency might be escaped, given
the lack of symbolism. Without these trappings, Kleege’s verbal announcement introduces her
students to vision impairment, perhaps for the first time. However, for the blind teacher, part of
the onus of disclosure is the need for reassurance; that nobody will be confused or
uncomfortable because of the teacher’s impaired vision is as important to the learners and the
teacher as it is to the university. As Kleege says, ‘I must talk about it to dispel possible
confusion or discomfort’ (ibid.: 11). This explanation might stop there, yet anchoring the
consequences of disability solely to the individual runs the risk of placing responsibility for its
implications on the teacher alone.
Disclosure, though, like disability and blindness, carries social inferences. Similarly to Kleege,
Michalko describes disclosing on the first day of semester:
My course, along with every other course in this university and in
courses in universities everywhere, is about to begin in the midst of
the ubiquitous, taken-for-granted
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 and thus unnoticed ‘sense of sight’. Like the air we breathe, sight is
everywhere in my classroom, and like the air, it is not noticed and not
even seen. The classroom — its equipment and social organisation
— all bear the mark of sight; students ‘see’ and assume this of one
another and they assume that they all see the same things and in the
same way. There is no blindness visible anywhere in the classroom
... till now.
(2001: 352, italics in original)
The epistemic contingency, for Michalko, is the presence of blindness that is pedagogical in its
commitment to teaching students about sightedness, a daunting task that requires him to
assume blindness as an intrinsic part of his identity. Thus, Michalko’s vision impairment may be
read as a social impairment (see Shildrick 2012).
Disclosure in the contexts in which we have described it here is contextually specific —
situations that we accept differ markedly for all people living with impaired vision. More often
than not, disclosure is a process of medicalisation, whereby institutions such as schools,
universities and governments rely on diagnostic identification of blindness in order to apportion
resources (Whitburn 2014). While this may infer a lack of agency for the person with vision
impairment — the diagnosed subject — they will (or at least should) nonetheless be engaged in
ongoing negotiations over how the diagnostic branding affects them. The negotiators, then, are
the blind person and to some extent his or her allies, while a ‘typical’ person with sight is never
given a context in which to question their sightedness.
Languaging blindness
As we have demonstrated, blindness and sightedness are achieved through social interaction,
and social discourse relies upon the linguistic conventions to which we abide (Bolt 2005;
Michalko 2001). Returning to Locke’s empiricism, it is no accident that seeing is legitimised in
Western conceptions of everyday life as the most dominant sense for knowing and moving in
the world; moreover, language perpetuates this stronghold. As Rorty writes in the introduction to
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, ‘To know is to represent accurately what is outside the
mind; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in
which the mind is able to construct such representations’ (1979: 84). In the Western tradition,
these representations are made frequently possible using visual metaphors. ‘An extensive
vocabulary of “visuality”’ (Jenks 1995: 3) ensures that ‘routinely the voir in savoir speaks
through our daily knowing and through our tacit rules of agreement’ (ibid.: 4). In Michalko’ s
classroom, ‘the students have had many years of educational practice for “seeing” that “seeing
is enlightenment and blindness is ignorance”. They have had years of encouragement to “step
out of the darkness” and “into the light” (see what I mean?)’ (2001: 355), which he is compelled
to disrupt by introducing them to blindness.
Similarly, figurative language that unquestioningly submits to the visual is habitually used in
published literature. McKnight and Whitburn (2017) refer to ‘the wince’ of recurrently
encountering positivist language in empirical and conceptual work, incongruously designed to
redress marginalisation in schooling. Beyond taking for granted that seeing is knowing, subjects
of research are often ‘viewed’ using a lens — theoretical, practical, material — that creates
distance. For McKnight and Whitburn, these linguistic tropes might be easy to ‘see’; however,
researchers who use them are complicit in ‘reinforcing dominant ways of being and knowing;
and of manipulating a looking glass through the closed circuit of reflexivity so as to see a clear,
objective picture of the issues at hand, otherwise known as “truth”’ (ibid.: 828). Instead, they
suggest that researchers acknowledge that ‘language produces reality, distorts it,
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and works with it in unanimity to create explanation’ (ibid.: 829), and therefore to reach for other
forms of representation — a warning that seems equally significant to any discipline of disability
studies that is put to work to overcome ableism.
Emphasising relationality
Coming to know blindness, as we have demonstrated, necessarily entails a consideration of
personhood insofar as we are each part of an assemblage, or what Goodley and Runswick-Cole
refer to as ‘collective humanness’ (2016: 1). On a day to day basis, any number of exterior
entities — people, animals, material objects, technologies — intermingle with blind individuals in
support of routine. To put this another way, interdependence — relations with other beings and
matter — facilitate everyday tasks such as mobility and travel, as well as inclusion and
exclusion. Take, for example, how Michalko came to understand his need for guided support:
Suddenly I touched something with my left knee. It was a gentle
touch, but a touch nonetheless. Just as suddenly, the voice of a
woman: ‘No, out of his way. Come over here.’ The touch I felt was a
child! The anxiety that rushed through my body froze me. I had
almost knocked a child down two flights of stairs. There was no
question now. I needed help.
(1999: 10)
That Michalko identified a need for help on the basis of his diminishing sight, and the associated
imposition of danger to children, might be read as a set of circumstances upsetting to the ‘fully
functioning person as an entity psychologised, internalised, rational, autonomous and
individualised self (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2016: 8). A tragedy or medical model
conception would certainly hold this position, and Michalko’s vulnerabilities would be perceived
as recurrently inseparable from deficit. People can unquestionably feel this way when
introduced to blindness. Yet to ignore the propagative potential of the relationship between
Michalko and a guide — guide dog, person, technology — is to misconstrue blindness.
Collective action is constitutive of blind epistemologies, and an introduction to blindness should
account for this development affirmatively by decentring the individual. Michalko writes of his
own introduction to blindness to this end: ‘I could no longer continue with blindness alone. I
needed a guide not only to get around, but also to “guide” others to the understanding that I was
blind’ (1999). This collaborative partner in blindness would take the form of a guide dog,
Smokie, whose companionship would develop further ways of understanding in both the
material and discursive terrains of sightedness and sightlessness. The two — person and dog
— would morph into one, advancing an embodied state of connected identity, and significantly,
reshaping the phenomenon of blindness.
A two-in-one morphology might be understood to constitute everyday practices of blindness, in
concert with the negotiation of disclosure with which we commenced this discussion. In
‘Travelling Blind’ (Michalko and Titchkosky 2018), the significance of the relational is further
developed. The ways that two travellers — one sighted, one blind — interrelate and are
constituted within different environments creates openings for the examination of sociocultural
depictions of blindness. In unison, both carry agentic capacities, which function in different
ways. The authors explain this thus:
As they travel — one blind, one sighted — a certain oneness
emerges — the oneness of blindness travelling together. And yet, in
the mist of oneness, one that obscures
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 nearly all twoness, shapes are visible – barely, somewhat blurry,
difficult to put into focus – but, shapes nonetheless – two of them,
one blind, one sighted, one, deficiency; the other, efficiency – two,
travelling together as one.
(Ibid.: n.p.)
A relationality of this kind, in which the efficiency of sightedness supports the deficiency of
blindness in travel, also reaches to technological advancements. While travel aids including
white canes and guide dogs have existed for a long time, they can now be augmented with GPS
and smartphone technology. Services such as Aira, which positions itself as an ‘assistive
community’, bring together phone applications with camera technology, data transfer and a
network of trained professionals to deliver spontaneously accessible sighted support for almost
any task. Whatever the technology understood as guide, blindness, as it moves in the world and
lives in the midst of others, blind and sighted others, is a relational social actor. This has been
the thrust of this chapter.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have traced the itinerary of disability studies as it relates directly to blindness
and vision impairment. Starting with empiricism and its ableist, ocular-centric legacy, we have
considered disability studies and its contribution to knowledge through moral and medical
explanations of blindness, as well as the social, learned and critical developments that have
proceeded them. Turning to the embodiment of vision impairment and the significance of
relationalities, we demonstrate the impact of a type of scholarship that engages with the
complexities of both blindness and sightedness and their simultaneous implications for each
other. This necessarily demands disability studies scholarship and scholars to elude
ghettoisation of their work (Wolbring 2012) by examining the ways in which we interact through
the presence of blindness; how we utilise language in positioning blindness and sightedness in
everyday speech and in research; and how we consider the relational aspects of everyday
practice. This sense of disability studies works unrelentingly and critically to disrupt ableism and
empiricist traditions. The generative potential of an enhanced relationality such as this might
well be unbounded. But what seems certain to us is that their exploration through disability
studies is necessary in order to develop the field in ways that purposefully challenge notions of
seeing as knowing and blindness as ignorance.
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