ABSTRACT
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.
