Abstract
Borderlands of Blindness provides a compelling account of the challenges faced by the legally blind in the socially constructed ‘hinterland’ between the sighted and the totally blind. It draws on the experiences of the author and three interviewees, as well as a range of published biographies and other accounts, to document and analyse the barriers that the legally blind experience to full social and economic participation. Through a combination of personal experience, qualitative analysis and research, Omansky argues that the taken-for-granted assumptions of a society run for and by the sighted constitutes a hegemonic ‘ocularcentrism’ that decentres the experiences and needs of those on the spectrum of blindness. In particular, she emphasizes the liminal status of those such as herself who are neither ‘totally sighted’ nor ‘totally blind’ but who are often forced to choose between these two in a social context in which different varieties of sight go unacknowledged.
At the outset of the book, Omansky positions herself as an ‘insider’ to her subject matter by providing a first-hand account of her participation in a ‘simulated blindness’ exercise, in which she and a group of others are blindfolded in an effort to better understand the world of the blind. When she reveals to the others her own status as a legally blind person, and the fact that total darkness is not her experience of blindness, the confusion of the other participants introduce the key concerns of the book: behind the portrayals of blindness in terms of a simple binary (sighted/blind) is a diversity of lived experience that is poorly understood and addressed. The reader is provided with an introduction to the key theoretical perspectives that Omansky identifies as the book’s foundation, in particular postmodernism, social constructionism and disability studies, and a thoughtful overview of life story research and the complexity of qualitative research from an ‘insider’s’ perspective. A focus of the book is to bridge the materialist and sociocultural models that predominate in disability studies while also considering the embodied experience of impairment.
Omansky’s book is most persuasive in her critique of the response of schools, rehabilitation services and employers to the needs of the blind and the legally blind. She provides a fascinating history of these responses and uses a wealth of data to link the institutionalized marginalization of the legally blind to widespread poverty and unemployment among this group. These issues are well illustrated by vignettes from the lives of Omansky and her three research participants. However the lack of a larger pool of interviewees detracts from the claims and conclusions drawn by Omansky, who does not explain why she has limited her study to three participants and herself. The qualitative material is at times presented thematically and at other times in large, unanalysed chunks. Omansky emphasizes her commitment to the fidelity of her participants’ voices but life story material inevitably has a meandering quality that can lose clarity without some organization and analysis by the researcher. The reader gains a clear sense of her interviewees’ character and disposition, however provocative points sometimes went unexplored when presented within a longer stream-of-consciousness.
Omansky’s analysis becomes unsettling at times as she attempts to illustrate the depth of the problems encountered by the blind. The reliance on ‘ocularcentrism’ to explain these challenges has the effect of construing it as a trans-historical prejudice common to the sighted rather than as a product of material, social and symbolic forces. The inclusion of axes of analysis other than sightedness (such as gender, class or ethnicity, for example) could have provided additional insight. Comparisons between blindness residential schools and the Stolen Generation of Indigenous children (p. 69), or between needs-based prioritization of clients by rehabilitation services and the ‘Nazi selection for extermination of blind people’ (p. 92) were disquieting and unnecessary. Rehabilitation services and workers in particular are characterized as inept and self-serving, and Omansky berates the ‘hegemonic medical model’ throughout the book, which seems to deny the possibility of rapprochement with the very workforce who, in her account, most need to read her work.
Omansky’s book will provide disability scholars with new information about an under-researched area but it also serves as a useful entrée into disability studies for those outside the research field. More generally, it will be of interest to the legally blind and to those who work with them, since it poses a number of challenges to the ways in which the legally blind are educated, trained and supported to work. Her analysis of the lived experience of the legally blind is insightful and thought-provoking. At times the book is polemic, as advocacy and emancipatory research should be, although this could have been tempered by drawing on more diverse theoretical perspectives. The book points to the importance of further work on the recursive relationship between disenabling social environments and the embodied experience of those who have been disenabled, and the interests that the powerful can have in promoting particular representations of the marginalized.