The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

With her rhetoric of “image poverty” and blind people seizing the means of production, Fleet strikes me as a kind of Marxist of visual access—a revolutionary advocating for the blind proletariat who are not only plagued by material poverty but also exiled from the ubiquitous flow of visual capital.

Orientation and mobility, or O&M, is the ultimate blindness skill, the ability to safely find one’s way through an environment that can feel hostile or bewildering to the untrained blind person.

The primary problem of blindness is access to information. Books, magazines, leaflets, menus, labels, signs, maps, graphs, charts, spreadsheets, slide decks, whiteboards, photos, videos, blueprints, tables, diagrams, illustrations,

It occurred to me that the mind’s eye was the realm that Gossiaux was working in as well. But her work also raised a paradox: one of the wonders of art is this ability to represent visually things seen without eyes—but you still need working eyes to see it.

To make do, he uses a pet theory he’s developed, about people’s visual attractiveness—I’ve heard variations of it from a few blind people. It’s a theory of the voice. His idea is that if someone is attractive, they’ll be positively reinforced from a young age by their peers and family, who will imbue them with the confidence that physical hotness b

Oedipus doesn’t feel all that useful to me, as far as images of blindness and sexuality go. For obvious reasons, I’d like to avoid conceiving of blindness as a symbolic castration, no matter how tightly desire may be lashed to the visual. I’m much more drawn to Tiresias, the blind prophet in Sophocles’s play, who foretold Oedipus’s demise. In Ovid’

I regard people who cry at paintings a bit like I regard people who cry at the symphony: I don’t doubt their emotion, but it seems wild to me that something so formal could create such feeling. I’ve always looked at art with a cooler eye, as something that was interesting to talk and think about, but that rarely evoked visceral emotions.

Disability, like homosexuality, carries a stigma (a word that comes from the Greek for a mark made by a pointed instrument—a prick, a brand, a puncture—of the sort Oedipus applied to his own eyes). When I think of how that stigma can be overcome, the most powerful example I’ve found is in gay pride and the LGBTQ rights movement. I’m not yet comfort

If someone takes a new shape, in what way can we still speak of them as the same person they were before?