Unravels the ways that blind persons come to understand and live their lives. It shows that blindness is a life worth living and that blind persons must grapple with the question of what kind of blind person they choose to be.

Unravels the ways that blind persons come to understand and live their lives. It shows that blindness is a life worth living and that blind persons must grapple with the question of what kind of blind person they choose to be.

The purpose of this book is to provide concise biographical information about 400 notable blind persons. The people in this volume are but a small sample of many thousands of notable blind persons in history. Most of the information about their lives comes from secondary sources. Where feasible, some of the subject's own words were used.

Sheds new light on literary representations of blindness from a disability studies perspective

Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative engages with the cultural meanings and movements of blindness. This book addresses how blindness is lived in particular contexts—in offices of ophthalmology and psychiatry, in classrooms of higher education, in accessibility service offices, on the street, and at home. Taking the form of a play written in five acts, the narrative dramatizes how the main character’s blindness is conceived of in the world and in the self. Each act includes an analysis where blind studies is explored in relation to disability studies. This work reveals the performative enactment of blindness that is lived in the public as well as in the private corners of the self, demonstrating how blindness is a form of perception. Devon Healey’s work orients to blindness as a necessary and creative feature of the sensorium and shows how blindness is a form of perception.

Modern Western culture is saturated with images, imprinting visual standards of concepts such as beauty and femininity onto our collective consciousness. Blindness Through the Looking Glass examines how gender and femininity are performed and experienced in everyday life by women who do not rely on sight as their dominant mode of perception, identifying the multiple senses involved in the formation of gender identity within social interactions. Challenging visuality as the dominant mode to understand gender, social performance, and visual culture, the book offers an ethnographic investigation of blindness (and sight) as a human condition, putting both blindness and vision “on display” by discussing people’s auditory, tactile, and olfactory experiences as well as vision and sight, and by exploring ways that individuals perform blindness and “sightedness” in their everyday lives. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 blind women in Israel and anthropological fieldwork, the book investigates the social construction and daily experience of blindness in a range of domains. Uniquely, the book brings together blind symbolism with the everyday experiences of blind and sighted individuals, joining in mutual conversation the fields of disability studies, visual culture, anthropology of the senses, and gender studies.

This book presents the early existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger as a way to reformulate academic disability studies and activist disability politics. It redresses the almost categorical neglect of human difference in the philosophy of Heidegger. It proceeds by applying a revised version of his phenomenology to social policy aimed to get disabled persons to work and to methods in rehabilitation science intended to be more ‘client friendly’. Phenomenological philosophy is extended to the topic of disability, while, at the same time, two key concerns facing disability studies are addressed: the roles of capitalism in disablement, and of medical practice in the lives of disabled persons. By reframing disability as a lived way of being in the world, rather than bodily malfunction, the book asks how we might rethink medicine and capitalism in democratic ways. It aims to transform Heidegger’s work in light of his troubling politics to produce a democratic social theory of human difference.