Abstract
Over two decades ago, in Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women’s Experience, Kaschak (1993) described the impact of gendering starting at birth, with the masculine defining the feminine and all aspects of women’s lives. She called this ubiquitous force “the male cultural gaze” and argued that gender constructs what we know: it defines how women see themselves, see others, and are seen by others. In her latest book, Sight unseen: Gender and race through blind eyes, Kaschak begins with questions that emerged from Engendered Lives: “What if the defining sense of vision were absent? Are such crucial human characteristics as gender and ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation discoveries or inventions of a species dependent on sight?” (p. 3). How would we categorize each other if vision were absent? Kaschak maintains that only by studying instances where sight is absent from birth can we explore how vision itself impacts our understanding of ourselves and our gendered worldviews.
The ensuing investigation is ground-breaking. It provides a respectful and sensitive window into the lives of people who are blind. It makes clear that vision itself is a language that shapes our understanding of the world. By exploring how individuals without sight describe their experiences and subsequent cultural insights, we grasp the extent to which race and gender stereotypes, assumptions, and prejudices are embedded in the “knowing” of individuals with sight. Since this learning occurs preverbally, it is out of our awareness. We act upon these biases while remaining convinced that we hold no gender or racial biases. In Sight Unseen, the elucidation of the lives of individuals without sight brilliantly highlights the blindness of the sighted.
Kaschak’s use of a narrative ethnographic method to study individuals whose “ideas, perceptions, and biases have not entered their brains through their eyes, but through a different route” (p. 18) is highly innovative and creative. This feminist, qualitative approach allowed Kaschak and her student researchers to deeply and personally engage with the participants in naturalistic settings chosen by the participants, a group comprised of cis-males and cis-females, who identified as white, Latinx, African American, heterosexual, lesbian, and bisexual and represented different economic and employment levels. All interviews/interactions were transcribed, and through an iterative process the research team sought to learn how each individual made sense of their own world.
Kaschak dedicates 10 of the chapters to telling the stories of the participants: how they construct their own identities, how they go about their lives in a sighted society, the issues they consider central to their lives, and how they think about race and gender. As a feminist researcher, Kaschak eschews the false objectivity that permeates psychology writing. The engaging and moving narratives are rich and complex, intertwining the participants’ stories and responses with Kaschak’s narrative of her reactions to the encounters as well and her interpretation of the psychological and epistemological questions that emerge. The stories underscore the difficulty of living in a sighted society and the unique ways the participants approach both the practical challenges of day-to-day living and trials such as marginalization and isolation. The narratives go well beyond Kaschak’s original questions, providing the reader with vivid descriptions on a broad array of topics.
The ways in which the individuals consider gender and race are intriguing. One need not be sighted to learn the biases, stereotypes, and hierarchies of the culture. Kaschak’s “cultural gaze” is alive and well in people without sight. However, the participants voice their awareness of and conformity to these biases; they allow them to fit into a sighted world. Jesse and Luke emphasize that physical attractiveness is important in the women they date, because it conveys status to their sighted friends. The female participants worry whether they are attractive enough, knowing the value of beauty in the sighted world. Samantha dresses to be the center of attention, the picture of femininity. She, and others in the study, were indoctrinated into being female by vigilant family members aided by the braille version of Seventeen Magazine. Isabel relies on her friends to recommend hair and clothing styles that will signal her availability for a lesbian relationship. As girls, they learned how to sit, stand, walk, and diet.
Racism was also carefully taught. The participants detail from distinct vantage points their exposure to the language of prejudice and racial stereotypes. Isabel, who is white, learned from her father that blacks, Jews, Catholics, and Democrats were all problems, and she gleaned early that race is not about color. Abigail, also white, spent her summers at a racially diverse camp for children. She recalled how some parents became concerned when adolescent friendships turned into dating. The adolescents did not see racial differences, but the parents did. Suzanne and Gil, both black, described how they are subjected to racist comments by their white friends who cannot see they are black, friends who assumed that they could distinguish race based on speech. For Kaschak, these encounters underscore critical race theory: “it is racism that creates racialization and the idea of race and not the reverse” (p. 162).
Sight Unseen is Kaschak’s latest exploration into the basic premise of feminist theory that context is the foundation of who we are and what we know. It is a brave and fascinating exploration and an exemplar of feminist scholarship at its best. Written for a community broader than psychology, Kaschak embeds theories, research, and explanations throughout the chapters in a compelling way, akin to complex jazz riffs. I found this style exciting; she challenges the reader to cut across silos of scholarship and think more deeply about their relationship to each other. In the telling, Kaschak makes herself transparent and vulnerable and invites the reader to do the same. I found myself re-reading several of the chapters in order to capture the many themes introduced and explicated throughout. My students concur. They are absorbed by Sight Unseen on many levels: from observing a feminist research paradigm in action to reading vivid portrayals of the lives of the participants, to witnessing critical race and gender theories operate in the flesh.
