Abstract
In this autoethnographic paper, I present some personal reflections on negotiating tricky identity-related terrain as sociocultural beliefs about disability, femininity, impairment, and sexuality interact with my embodiment as a blind woman. This has primarily to do with being in some ways liberated and in other ways banished from both normative femininity and the gaze. I describe the complicated double-binds in my own experience with seeking belonging, that is, social and sexual legitimacy against the backdrop of a prohibitive gender system rooted in visual culture, which might be resonant for other blind and disabled women. I also consider the implications for blind and disabled women of being positioned as “transcenders” of visual culture and the gender regime. I suggest that, rather than liberation, this positioning might be felt by disabled women as further marginalisation, a banishment from acceptability and legitimacy.
Riki Anne Wilchins writes: “For some of us, the meanings culture drapes upon our bodies are extremely painful and depressing” (2006, p. 550). Scholars drawing on both critical feminist and critical disability theories recognise that bodies bear meaning, and that these bodies are socially read and interpreted against constructed gendered and ableist norms with personal and political, emotional, and material consequences (Erevelles & Minear, 2010; Garland-Thomson, 2002, 2011; Wilchins, 2006). For women with disabilities, an array of largely negative sociocultural meanings attached to bodies with impairments have tended to result in exclusion from a constructed feminine norm, desire and desirability, and sexual and sensual recognition (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Hammer, 2019; Popplestone, 2009). This exclusion has been found to have serious material implications in the lives of women with disabilities across contexts. For instance, a deeply embedded sociocultural belief that women with disabilities are not, cannot, and should not be sexually active limits their access to sexual health information and services. This has potentially devastating effects related to sexual and reproductive wellness, sexual abuse, and the suppression of healthy sexual expression (Goyall, 2017; Kahonde et al., 2020). Exclusion from socially constructed “acceptable” femininity also has implications at the level of psycho-emotional well-being, impacting the sense of self and belonging of women with disabilities (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Popplestone, 2009). The interplay between sexual and social legitimacy in the lives of people with disabilities, related not only to material inclusion but to personal and collective identity and belonging, has also been recognised (Popplestone, 2009; Shakespeare et al., 1996). In considering the holistic well-being of women with disabilities, therefore, it is essential to recognise that both material, access-related concerns and emotional, identity-related aspects are at play as sociocultural beliefs about disability and femininity come up against one another.
In this autoethnographic paper, I reflect on navigating tricky identity-related terrain as sociocultural discourses of femininity, disability, impairment, and sexuality intersect with my embodiment as a blind woman (Garland-Thomson, 2011). These negotiations have to do with a desire to be desired, valued, and seen, while not being able to see. My experience has involved, on the one hand, in some ways, being liberated from an oppressive, even harmful male gaze (and my own self-appraising and critical look), while, at the same time, feeling excluded from sensual and sexual recognition, and anxious about maintaining a “correct” feminine appearance. Garland-Thomson (2002, p. 18) states in the influential paper “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” that “Banishment from femininity can be both a liability and a benefit.” It has been argued that banishment from the feminine norm holds liberating potential for women with disabilities, and that disability holds transformative potential for how acceptable femininity is viewed, through enabling alternate feminine embodiment to be brought, however metaphorically, into view (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Hammer, 2019). Social theorists have also often considered the potential that blindness holds to problematise visual culture, constructed beauty standards, and the interaction between sight and prejudice (Hammer, 2019; Obasogie, 2014). This work suggests that there are liberatory and transformative possibilities in “not seeing,” in being banished from gazing and the gaze. Yet, away from theory, there is real life (Mairs, 1996), my real life where, whatever the supposed liberatory and transformative potential, Wilchins’s words ring true; having one's body draped in meanings that cause exclusion from acceptance, desirability, and belonging is painful.
Methodology
I present reflections on personal experiences in line with an autoethnographic approach. This involves both an “inward focus” on memories, thoughts, and feelings, and an “outward focus” to make sense of these in relation to external realities (Le Roux, 2017; Lourens, 2021). As Lourens (2018) explains, autoethnography involves sharing personal stories while embedding these in one's relationships, context, and culture. This paper is an “analytical” autoethnography as it interweaves personal experiences with reflections on existing theory and literature (Le Roux, 2017), particularly that which focuses on intersections between disability, femininity, and gendered performance.
Le Roux (2017) states that autoethnography “accommodates subjectivity, emotionality and researcher influence,” while inviting the reader to participate in the knowledge process through their own interpretation and critique of what is presented (p. 198). Through expanding the notion of what constitutes “legitimate” knowledge, autoethnography has been a particularly useful method for the sharing and theorising of experiences from historically marginalised groups. This aligns with the feminist principle that the personal is political, as well as with discussions on the politics of voice and knowledge in some feminist work, and particularly work emanating from African feminists (Mama, 2000; Mbilinyi, 1992; Mohanty, 1991). African feminist scholar and activist Amina Mama’s words resonate as she asserts that writing personal experiences is a means to “[claw] back the heavy tarpaulin of one's subjection” (2000, p. 20). African feminists have underscored the power in writing and speaking experiences as acts of rebellion against the historically, sociopolitically, and culturally imposed silence on African, Black, female, and colonised subjects, what has also been called “epistemic injustice” (Fricker, 2007).
Similarly, scholars and activists with disabilities describe the silences that surround their experiences (Kleege, 2006; Lourens, 2018; Michalko, 2002). Lourens (2018) refers to this as “the politics of shutting up,” describing how social acceptance and access to assistance is often contingent on disabled people silencing experiences of struggle, anger, or dissatisfaction. Within the historically dominant “medical model” approach to disability, as those connected to contemporary disability politics well know, disabled people were not acknowledged as holding essential experiential knowledge about their own needs and circumstances (Shakespeare, 2014). For disabled people, then, autoethnography holds several benefits.
Firstly, autoethnography is a means to break the silence around disability experience in academic and social spheres, through bringing to light the often unseen personal, relational, and practical predicaments that disabled people face (Lourens, 2021). Secondly, through describing these predicaments and interpreting them in context, autoethnographic work contributes to critical theorising of disability in society (Harvey & Kotze, 2022; Lourens, 2018). Thirdly, autoethnography holds therapeutic potential for disabled people as they voice and interpret previously silenced experiences and feelings (Le Roux, 2017; Lourens, 2021). Here, I attempt to follow the example of other disabled scholars who have taken on the emotionally difficult, vulnerable task of drawing on their personal experiences to contribute to theorising on disability, gender, embodiment, and identity (Harvey & Kotze, 2022; Lourens, 2021; Popplestone, 2009).
Autoethnographies, being in large part a creative endeavour, do not follow a standard form (Lourens, 2018). In what follows, I explore three questions that have recently arisen for me in the negotiation of my sight loss and femininity. I am not seeking answers. Rather, I consider what asking these questions in the first place might reveal about my own navigation of blindness and femininity, and perhaps the terrain that other women with blindness and disabilities have to traverse. I conclude with a discussion of the complexities of banishment and liberation from normative femininity and the gaze, considering the double-binds that negotiating a disabled identity against the backdrop of prohibitive gender norms creates (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Popplestone, 2009). I also discuss the implications for women who are blind and disabled of being positioned as transcenders of visual culture and the gender system (Samuels, 2002).
At the outset, it is necessary to acknowledge my own disability politics, which have emerged through my lived experience and my reading and consideration of disability scholarship, as these influence the analytical framework through which the below recollections and feelings are interpreted. Aligning largely with feminist disability studies theorising (Garland-Thomson, 2011), these disability politics hold that developing a robust understanding of the predicaments that disabled people face requires that we recognise the interplay between embodiment, environment, and sociocultural beliefs and embedded meanings about impairments, such as blindness, and how these intersect with other subject positions. I am in agreement with Lourens (2021), who asserts that addressing disablist oppression requires not merely the dismantling of physical access barriers, but the breaking of silences through the sharing of “personal and fleshy truths of disabled bodies” (p. 5). It is also important to locate myself as a cis-gender, heterosexual woman and to state that the reflections here are based on this identification. I am also a White South African, meaning that I occupy an, at times, complicated position of privilege and disadvantage in the postapartheid landscape, as my embodiments of blindness (which has caused me to experience exclusion and discrimination) and Whiteness (enabling my occupation of a position of privilege) intersect.
“Do I look alright?”
To maintain social acceptance, inclusion, participation, connection, and belonging, persons with disabilities are required to make careful choices about gendered performance (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Hammer, 2019). These choices are often complicated by embodiment, as Popplestone (2009, p. 129) reminds us: “There are realities about disability that we cannot get away from.” My own embodied reality is of progressive vision loss. During 2020, while the world faced an unprecedented public health crisis, I was at home facing a comparatively minuscule personal crisis of my own. I stood, my nose pressed up against the bathroom mirror, turning my face this way and that, straining my right eye (the “good” one) to catch just a glimpse of myself. It was no good. All I was now was a blur. I used to be able to make out at least the way that my hair framed my face, the shape of my eyes and eyebrows, and the line of my jaw. I was now a shapeless, faceless person. I felt unsettled, a bit panicked even. My ability to adhere to the rules of normative feminine appearance management had always been a comfort to me, a source of pride. I knew the “rules”—what society holds to be attractive, desirable, and, therefore, acceptable (that is, heteronormative) femininity—and could follow them reasonably well. Now, I still know the rules but my ability to follow them successfully is in question.
Hammer (2019), in empirical work with women with visual impairments in Israel, unpacks the ways in which visual culture affects blind women. Although visual culture does not acknowledge blindness, society demands that blind persons demonstrate an awareness of visual aesthetics and the gaze (Hammer, 2019; Kleege, 2005). Blind women are socialised into visual awareness and participation, being taught through vocational training, and shown in relationships and through the media that they are being visually appraised and interpreted (Hammer, 2019; Popplestone, 2009). Hammer, (2019, p. 48) notes that, contrary to what sighted society may believe, blind women are active, “gendered agents” in visual culture, making strategic choices, finding enjoyment in practices of grooming and beautification, and feeling empowered through disproving a stereotype of blindness as unconcerned with aesthetics. There is also, however, a disciplinary aspect to these self-directed, bodily practices, including careful choices about dress, make-up, and grooming (Hammer, 2019). Although this need not necessarily be viewed as exclusively negative (there may be enjoyment in disciplining practices), Foucauldian work on disciplinary power would require us to view these practices as “dangerous”—that is, not free from the constraining yet productive relations of power-knowledge (Tremain, 2017). Correspondingly, Hammer (2019) recognises the tensions in blind women's appearance management practices between pleasure and oppression, empowerment and discipline, freedom and constraint.
Blind women's appearance management is about more than just projecting “acceptable femininity” though. Autoethnographic reflections on blindness, as well as empirical work, suggest that society is most welcoming of blindness when it is masked (Kleege, 2006; Swartz et al., 2018). In their work on blind students’ experiences of inclusive ballroom dancing classes, Swartz et al. (2018) note how compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity, and compulsory able-bodiedness, are at play in performances that demonstrate normative masculinity and femininity, and conceal blindness, as blind students are paired with sighted partners and carefully project the illusion of normative bodies connected to normative gender roles. For instance, a blind male student in their study described the intentional way in which he and his sighted dance partner developed a strategy to make it appear as though he was fulfilling the masculine role of leading. As with the women in Hammer (2019), there is enjoyment in the gendered and sighted performances that these blind dancers describe—in their own words, to “fitting in and looking pretty” (Swartz et al., 2018, p. 1098)—but there is also discipline, and the sense that there is no alternative to performing within these normative rules. These dancers were concerned about how they looked and whether they looked alright, which is related to both gendered and sighted performance.
“Do I look alright?” In my own life with visual impairment, this question is on my lips daily, the final step in the routine to get from waking up to heading out into the world. I suppose that it is not that unusual. Women often ask this question, steeped as we are in cultural ideas and anxieties about what “alright” is supposed to look like. When I ask this question, though, there is additional anxiety. Unlike a sighted woman who can, however self-critically, assess what she looks like, who is perhaps not in the market for blatant honesty, who might merely be seeking simple confirmation and affirmation with this question, my own increasing inability to accurately assess my appearance leaves me reliant on a thorough and honest, even brutal, answer from someone who can see. I have had to make this clear to the sighted people in my life. When I ask about my appearance, I am not wanting to simply hear, “You look great.” No, I really do need to know whether my foundation is blended properly, whether my outfit is working, and whether there are any stains or blemishes on my clothes or skin, because these seemingly minor missteps might be unforgivable when blindness is in the identity mix. More than this, like the dancers, for me, looking alright is also about looking blind or, rather, not looking blind. When I ask, “Do I look alright?” then, I am asking, “Have I followed the rules of socially acceptable feminine performance correctly?” and “Do I appear acceptable to you in the terms of visual culture?” I am also asking, “Do I look blind to you?”
What does it mean to “look blind”?
What does it mean to “look blind”? Even without sight, we are expected to know the answer to this question and to respond in order, ideally, to conceal the difference that blindness signals (Kleege, 2006; Michalko, 2002; Swartz et al., 2018). As Kleege (2005, p. 179) asserts: “The average blind person knows more about what it means to be sighted than the average sighted person knows about what it means to be blind.” Borrowing Garland-Thomson's (2009) wordplay: looking blind is not just about how we look (that is, appear), it is also about how we look (that is, see), or, perhaps more accurately, how we do not look. Garland-Thomson notes that “the visual comportment of people with significant disabilities—often those with cognitive, developmental, or perceptual impairments—catalogue them as blank starers” (Garland-Thomson, 2009, p. 24), a highly stigmatised embodiment. The unfocused look/stare signifies a failure to know, understand, and recognise, it suggests that the starer cannot and does not desire connection, and that they might lack the requisite knowledge to act (Garland-Thomson, 2009).
Damaged eyes and blank stares unsettle the observer, provoking anxieties about fragility, impotence, and an unknown darkened world (Bolt, 2014), a fact that blind people are made to internalise, with implications for the performances and appearance management they perfect (Gitter, 2001; Kleege, 2006). Gitter (2001), for instance, describes how “out of deference to the squeamishness of the sighted,” students at the Perkins School, one of the first institutions in the world to educate blind and deafblind children, were required to conceal their damaged eyes with ribbons (p. 79). Similarly, Kleege (2006) explores the meticulous curriculum of sighted performance that surrounded the young Helen Keller, including attention to body language, facial expression, and grooming. This careful performance was made complete with expensive prosthetic blue eyes (Kleege, 2006).
Echoing into contemporary rehabilitation practice, commonly used reference books on adjustment to visual impairment suggest that many of the “social problems” that blind persons are likely to face concern the fact that an inability to make eye contact and respond to visual cues, as well as visibly damaged eyes, is unsettling for those who can see (Dodds, 1993; Tuttle & Tuttle, 2004). Although these texts do note that blindness is subject to certain negative social attitudes towards difference, the onus to manage social anxieties is placed on blind persons, with practitioners being advised to help their clients (both with congenital and acquired blindness) to mask their impairments with various techniques and to manage self-stimulating mannerisms (known as “blindisms”), which are viewed as antisocial (Tuttle & Tuttle, 2004). Ultimately, these texts strongly suggest that the blind client must be made to understand what her presence evokes in the sighted people around her and be taught to manage herself accordingly.
I had ample opportunity to gather and internalise knowledge on what blindness looked like and what this meant throughout my life as a not-quite-blind person (Botha & Watermeyer, 2021). I was often told: “but you don’t look blind.” I wore these “compliments” as a badge of honour. They were a comfort, signalling to me that my visual impairment, if properly masked, would not leave me marginalised. “Don’t worry,” my eager complimenters seemed to say, No one can tell that you are not one of us. You don’t have to associate with those others with canes and dogs and opaque eyes and neediness and all our other imaginings. As long as you do not make us too uncomfortable, you can stay here with us.
I realised that while these people were referring to the undamaged appearance of my eyes, access to their acceptance also depended on being able to appear to be connecting visually with them, making eye contact, and reacting “appropriately.” I, therefore, paid careful attention to performing eye contact and managing my facial expressions when engaging with others.
I recall as an adolescent being introduced to several older blind women through mutual friends and, later, at university. As I was experiencing ever decreasing functional sight, and trying to make sense of what this would mean for my life, these women kindly took the time to speak with me. These conversations were formative; we spoke about careers, relationships, and access, and we laughed. Yet, I could never help noticing with my partial sight the flaws in their sighted performances, which felt intertwined with their feminine acceptability—a chin angled slightly too high, a gaze misdirected, a vacant look, an involuntary shake of the head, a little too much blush. These minor missteps seemed gaping to me. Carrying internalised ideas about disability, femininity, and value, I assured myself that while seamless social acceptance might be out of reach for my blind mentors, it was not so for me. I could still pass as acceptable. I could still “fit in and look pretty” (Swartz et al., 2018, p. 1098).
So, years later, as I stared at the nothingness in my bathroom mirror, the rising panic had to do not with sight loss itself, I had navigated visual losses large and small before. I stopped reading print 15 years ago, got a guide dog soon after, and stopped using magnification software in favour of text-to-speech in 2017. Not that these losses were not difficult, but there was something about this moment of realising that my face was lost to me that felt more significant. I felt that after a lifetime of “borderland” citizenship (Omansky, 2011), I was being initiated into blind womanhood and that, as a result, something about my previously relatively seamless normative feminine acceptability was having to be renegotiated.
A friend once told me that, on hearing about my visual impairment, a mutual acquaintance said in disbelief: “But she can’t be blind, she’s beautiful.” Though perhaps flattering, the inference here is painfully clear—beautiful people are not blind, and blind people are not beautiful. As Popplestone recalls her brother remarking: “You know, Sis, if you had been able to see you would have been bloody attractive” (2009, p. 137). I was stepping across the boundary into blindness, no longer excepted from its sociocultural meanings through a meticulous sighted and feminine performance, but draped in these sociocultural meanings, in a body that, now quite visibly, cannot see (Wilchins, 2006). Even being steeped in critical disability theory, with postgraduate degrees in gender and disability studies, at that moment with the mirror and my invisible face, my thoughts were not of social constructs, the gender regime, or capitalist and patriarchal beauty standards. Instead, I wondered to what extent my entrance into blind womanhood would make me less beautiful, less desirable, less acceptable. I joked with a few friends that not being able to see myself would enable me to remain young and lovely forever in my own imagination. But I privately grieved my lost ability to appraise my own adherence to beauty standards while worrying that my inability to maintain a passable sighted performance would result in me increasingly looking blind, which would change the way that the world looked at me.
To explore this further, in the next section, I reflect on a recent encounter. This section involves a tonal shift from what has come before as my “analytical voice” is silent. Rather, I share this experience as a first-person, present tense narrator attempting to give voice to my complicated feelings without filtering or untangling them through the application of theory (Harvey & Kotze, 2022). I then return to a more analytical tone in the final section, which explores the complexities of banishment and liberation from normative femininity and the gaze.
“How do others see me?”
I’m queuing up to order my usual cappuccino at my local coffee shop. I walk here with my guide dog once or twice a week to get some fresh air and a change of scenery. As I queue, I hear one of the baristas, a charismatic guy whose voice always cuts over the hustle and bustle, chatting and flirting with the customers, particularly the women. Today, he seems to be channelling the character of Joey, the shameless womaniser wrapped up in disarming haplessness and charm from the sitcom, Friends. He affects an American accent and greets every woman who steps up to his counter with Joey's well-worn catch phrase, “How you doin’?” It is his use of this reference which leads me to guess that he is around my age. I wonder if he is actually winking or if Joey's suggestive wink is merely implied. I internally roll my eyes at this, sure that many of the women around me are doing the same. Even so, I hear almost every female voice respond with a laugh, some throwing back a flirty comment of her own, “all the better for seeing you.”
It's my turn to step up to the counter. The exchange that I have with the barista is always much the same and very different from the interactions I overhear with other female customers. “Morning ma’am, is it the usual for you?” he asks. Suddenly, the American accent and flirtatious tone are gone. There is no hint of a suggestive wink here. His voice is gentler, softer, like he is speaking to a respected elder, someone quite fragile or not very bright. His tone, the very sudden gear shift, makes me feel both childish and far older than my 35 years all at the same time. I feel passed over, visible yet unseen. He then switches from English to Xhosa, raising his voice to get the attention of a coworker. Limited as my vocabulary is, I discern the words “girl,” “see,” and “sit.” I am the girl who cannot see, who needs to be helped to a seat. I smile and thank him as his coworker comes over to help me to my regular armchair.
As I settle in with my coffee, hearing him switch gears to the upbeat flirtatious tone again, I wonder why this exchange bothers me so much. How strange to feel affronted by what, on the surface, appears to be a respectful tone (albeit peppered with something that sounds very much like pity). Surely, I have just escaped having to role play a sexist trope. Joey has, after all, been widely criticised as a sexist character who persistently objectifies women. Perhaps beneath the laughter and flirty comments, my fellow female patrons are cringing. Perhaps there is a salacious wink accompanying the banter that makes their skin crawl just a bit. The mind also does not have to wonder far to realise that there might be more than gender but racial and socioeconomic dynamics here too, as the barista (a Black man) serves patrons who are mostly White and wealthy. What might he feel bound to perform, and what might this conceal, and with what costs and benefits for him? Here, our respective positions in relation to gender, race, and disability in South Africa come into contact, and the result is far from simple.
Yet, despite this, and all my feminist sensibilities, I cannot help thinking, “Hey, where's my low-key sexist objectification?” I berate myself—what a terrible thing to think. This is tricky, awkward terrain. I take some comfort from Roxanne Gay's Bad Feminist, remembering something about the rap music she blasts in her car, and later finding the passage: When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume even though the lyrics are degrading to women and offend me to my core. The classic Ying Yang Twins song “Salt Shaker”? It's amazing. ‘Bitch you gotta shake it till your camel starts to hurt.’ Poetry. I am mortified by my music choices. (2014, p. 314)
I am also mortified. I also feel “full of contradictions” (Gay, 2014, p. 314). I want to be seen and included in the gendered role-playing that is going on here, even though it is gross. I want to feel pretty, feminine, and desirable, even through the most superficial interaction with the man who makes my coffee, who is obviously performing, putting on the charm for all the girls. But that's the point, isn’t it? I want to be just another girl at the counter. Instead, I feel as though disability difference, with negative and discomforting associations, is all that others see when they look at me.
Banishment and liberation
Garland-Thomson (2002) has explored the ways in which incorporating disability (as both sociocultural construct and embodied experience) into feminist theory complicates and enriches critical work on representation, the body, identity, and activism. Considering identity, Garland-Thomson describes an ironic contrast between the cultural icon, Barbie, and her disabled companion, Share-a-Smile Becky (2002, p. 18). Garland-Thomson notes that Becky, whose disability seems to release her from the requirement to embody feminine stereotypes, wears seemingly comfortable, lose-fitting clothes and sneakers, has limbs that can bend and feet that are flat, and is shown being able to participate in sports and hobbies. On the other hand, Barbie, “in her restrictive sequinned gowns, crowns and push-up bras,” with unbending limbs, toes perpetually pointed to fit stiletto heels, and impossible bodily dimensions, seems trapped within a hyper-feminine performance (Garland-Thomson, 2002, p. 18). Becky might be marginal, and she is certainly not desirable (there is no way she will be wheeling in to steal Ken's affections), but she has apparently escaped having to adopt a limiting feminine performance based on oppressive gender norms. For Garland-Thomson, Becky illustrates that “banishment from femininity can be both a liability and a benefit” (2002, p. 18).
As an aside, Becky's marginal place is maintained in the recent and generally well-received film, Barbie. Theri A. Pickens (2023) remarks, in a blog post critiquing disability visibility in the film, that the overall absence of a wheelchair-using character (she appears briefly twice) reveals that disability remains unspeakable. While it might be superficially represented, it remains an unseen and unheard experience, and certainly not one that is able to be laughed with, that can join in with the joke. Pickens (2023) asserts: Leaving something unremarked upon in a satire implies the idea is too sensitive, too serious, or the writer just can’t find the funny. That's where wheelchair using Barbie dwells in Barbieland. She remains where most real world physically disabled women are imagined to be and often are: on the margins. She is present as part of a representational effort, but ultimately relegated to the periphery. Viewers can hardly see wheelchair Barbie in the final scene unless they’re looking for her. In this way, the movie leaves physical disability out of the satirical frame.
So, Becky (or wheelchair-using Barbie) is banished from a constructed feminine norm, desire, and desirability, as well as the potentially transformative and liberating opportunity to poke fun at it all—oppressive structures, limiting views, and even, perhaps, herself. Resonating with these themes, at the heart of the above personal reflections on negotiating blindness, femininity and the gaze is the tension between banishment and liberation, and the question of whether one can ever be liberated from prohibitive gendered and ableist ideals. Arguably, even the ocular-centric language of “the gaze,” conceptually deployed within feminism(s), is rooted in ableism, potentially obscuring the nonvisual ways in which the gender system can and does operate, exerting power and discipline (Hammer, 2019).
While Share-a-Smile Becky might show both the liabilities and benefits of banishment from normative femininity, she also begs the question of what it might mean for women who are disabled to be held up as the metaphorical transcenders of the gender regime. Disability has often been conceptually mobilised to describe different forms of oppression and marginalisation, in particular, patriarchal (Samuels, 2002) and racial (Bell, 2012). It has been argued, though, that some scholarship which conceptually plays with what disability might reveal about—for instance, constructed gender norms and beauty standards, or the ways in which racialised bodies are prohibited from social movement—might overshadow real-world disabled experience and obscure the complex identity-related predicaments that disabled people must navigate (Botha & Watermeyer, 2021; Erevelles & Minear, 2010; Mairs, 1996). My own experience, explored elsewhere, of negotiating belonging and self as a White disabled woman in a postapartheid landscape where Blackness and disadvantage are so tightly bound up, resonates (Botha & Watermeyer, 2021). For me, navigating intersecting Whiteness and disability has often involved internally questioning the legitimacy of my experiences of socially engendered discrimination against the backdrop of my undeniable socioeconomic privilege, as well as the metaphorical conflation of Blackness with disability in conceptualising oppression (Bell, 2012; Botha & Watermeyer, 2021). Watermeyer and Swartz (2023) assert that what is often lacking in considering intersectionality is the way in which disability complicates identities, power, and oppression. This complication in my own experience left me uncertain for many years about the status I was able to claim related to social disadvantage.
All of this is not to say that work in feminism(s), and indeed critical race theory, that has incorporated disability as a conceptual tool is not valuable and potentially transformative, but we must take care not to lose real disabled people along the way. As Nancy Mairs, disabled scholar and author, reminds us: Marginality thus means something altogether different to me from what it means to social theorists. It is no metaphor for the power relations between one group of human beings and another but a literal description of where I stand (figuratively speaking): over here, on the edge, out of bounds, beneath your notice. I embody the metaphors. Only whether or not I like doing so is immaterial. (1996, p. 59)
Has blindness liberated me from the gaze? Perhaps only in the most narrow, biological sense has my inability to see freed me from both my own self-appraisal and the ability to perceive the gaze of others. However, being prohibited from gazing, at myself and others, is a source of extreme anxiety for me because the rules of normative feminine attractiveness are, whether with or without sight, known and keenly felt (Hammer, 2019; Swartz et al., 2018). Yet, society assumes that not to see is not to know, failing to recognise the complicated ways in which those of us who are blind interact with visual aesthetics and the gaze (Hammer, 2019; Kleege, 2005). Instead, conflating blindness with childlikeness, society plays with, seeks lessons from, and takes comfort in the idea that nonseers and nonknowers exist. Constructs in literature and art have often lauded blind people as both mystics and innocents, assuming that they exist outside of visual awareness and judgements (Bolt, 2014). Contemporary assumptions are often made that blind people have, for example, no racial consciousness and are therefore not capable of prejudice based on racist stereotypes (Obasogie, 2014). Similarly, as already mentioned, society assumes that blind people are immune to socially produced beauty standards as these are visually mediated (Hammer, 2019). These assumptions not only encourage a limited understanding of the operation of sexist, racist, and other forms of prejudice, as primarily rooted in how people see themselves and others 1 (Hammer, 2019; Obasogie, 2014), they also position blind people as perpetual innocents who must be protected from knowledge on such things as racial difference and what counts as a beautiful body (Kleege, 2017).
What society has constructed as liberation from gazing and the gaze might, in fact, be felt by blind persons as a paternalistic banishment to the unseeing and unknowing margins. This refuses to acknowledge blind people's alternate ways of knowing, nuanced understandings of the world, and ability and desire to participate in visual culture (Hammer, 2019; Kleege, 2017; Obasogie, 2014). It also refuses to acknowledge that blind people have the capacity for biases and prejudice (Obasogie, 2014), argued to be a dehumanising view. In fact, a small but interesting slice of disability rights activist discourse contends that disabled people, like anyone else, can also be misogynists, racists as well as selfish, cruel, and vindictive people who must be held accountable for their behaviour. Similarly, it seems that to claim inclusion as legitimate, though alternate, seers and knowers, blind people need to remind society, perhaps shattering its hopeful ideals: “Yes, we can also hold prejudiced attitudes of all kinds linked to what people do and should look like, even if we have been blind our entire lives, and we can and do turn these upon ourselves as well.”
Considering the male gaze, and a normative feminine ideal in particular, there are some ways in which it might appear that blindness has liberated me from a prohibitive, perhaps even harmful, gendered performance. However, as discussed above, this often feels far more like marginalisation, banishment from social acceptability, desire, desirability, and sexual and sensual recognition. As I have transitioned into, and even embraced, blindness, my seamless normative feminine performance and the social acceptability it offered have been the trade-off, and a painful one. Popplestone's (2009) discussion on banishment from expected gender roles, and the interweaving of sexual and social legitimacy, resonates. She recounts being told as a child that, because of her blindness, she was not expected to fulfil a normative gender role, but that, perhaps because of this “freedom,” other opportunities would be open to her. I am perhaps six and planning my future. I say to my mother: “When I grow up, I am going to have three children and I am going to call them…” My mother takes both my hands and utters a little pain-riddled laugh: “No Baby. You should be making different plans. You are so clever. You will be a famous teacher, or a musician. When you grow up you will not get married, you will not have babies. The kind of person you would want to marry, the kind of person you would deserve, would not marry a blind person. (2009, p. 137)
For Popplestone (2009), many of the women in Hammer (2019), the blind ballroom dancers in Swartz et al. (2018), and for me, we do not want out of normative gendered expectations, beauty standards, and desire within the bounds of what is deemed to be socially acceptable, we want in, largely because the costs of being out are simply too great. Another pertinent issue that must be raised here is the identity-related predicaments that people who are both disabled and queer face against intersecting compulsory able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and heterosexuality (Chapel, 2015; Kafer, 2006). Some disabled people might choose not to make their gender identification or sexual orientation known, while some queer people might choose not to disclose disability, especially where it is invisible, due to the risk of compounding stigma and exclusion (Chapel, 2015; Shakespeare et al., 1996). Wilchins (2006, p. 550) suggests that against the backdrop of the monolithic meanings which the gender system imposes on our bodies—“big breasts must mean one thing, hairy backs another, wrinkles yet another still”—we are left with “no room to construct ourselves and create alternatives.” In the midst of what blindness means in the gender system—unable and uninterested to participate in visual culture, unknowing and innocent, unattractive and undesirable, sexually and socially illegitimate, and much else (Bolt, 2014; Hammer, 2019; Popplestone, 2009)—it feels imperative to make every effort to exist within the bounds of normative femininity, even as these are limiting and oppressive. The rather tongue-in-cheek title of this paper, which gives voice to a gut reaction to the experience described in the previous section, in fact captures a complicated double-bind. This is the desire to be included, recognised, desired, and legitimised even within a prohibitive and harmful gender system that has and continues to objectify women, with serious material, psycho-emotional, and social consequences.
Concluding remarks
Through utilising autoethnography to explore my experiences of negotiating feminine identity, seeing and not seeing both self and others, and social and sexual legitimacy with blindness, this paper has aimed to populate thinking on the costs and benefits of banishment from normative femininity and the gaze with lived experience. I stated at the outset that my goal here was not to seek answers to the questions posed, but to consider what asking them in the first place might reveal about negotiating blindness, femininity, and the gaze. Firstly, that these questions remain prominent in my life even as my usable vision has diminished suggests that these identity-related negotiations remain firmly rooted in visual culture, aligning with findings in Hammer (2019) and Swartz et al. (2018). These studies and my experience disrupt an assumption that blind people exist somehow beyond sight and are not interested or able to participate as agents in visual culture (Hammer, 2019). Further exploration of how blindness interacts with visual culture, in both constraining and productive ways, is needed (Hammer, 2019; Kleege, 2005).
Further, as discourses on blindness and disability, and social and sexual legitimacy within the normative gender regime, interact, women who are blind and disabled might find themselves having to navigate double-binds (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Popplestone, 2009). Part of the personally therapeutic process of writing this autoethnography has been to make sense of this tricky internal terrain in my own life, which might be valuable for other women with disabilities, as well as those navigating other subject positions and embodiments (Lourens, 2021).
This discussion might also be useful for social theorists, including scholars in gender and feminist work, through its consideration of the real-world impact of the conceptual deployment of blindness and disability as illustrative of possibilities to transcend visual culture and the gender regime (Mairs, 1996; Samuels, 2002). Rather than a route to liberation, the deployment of blindness and disability as conceptual tools to problematise these systems might serve to further marginalise blind and disabled women, positioning them as innately separate from gendered norms, even as they seek social and sexual legitimacy (Hammer, 2019; Popplestone, 2009; Swartz et al., 2018).
Ultimately, women who are blind and disabled may find themselves with no room to explore or embrace alternative ways to do and to be in the world, having first and foremost to assert their belonging within, and ability to adhere to, normative femininity and gender roles as a means to claim inclusion and legitimacy. There are, however, generative possibilities for both theory and real lives to viewing blind women not as existing beyond the demands of the gender regime and visual culture, but as navigating within these systems (along with everyone else). Hammer (2019), for instance, has shown that recognising blind women as active gendered agents advances discussions on intersecting subject positions, gendered performance, and the sensory body. I hope that, through sharing my personal experiences, this paper has contributed to such discussions.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
