The Mystery Of The Eye And The Shadow Of Blindness

Unravels the ways that blind persons come to understand and live their lives. It shows that blindness is a life worth living and that blind persons must grapple with the question of what kind of blind person they choose to be.

The purpose of this book is to provide concise biographical information about 400 notable blind persons. The people in this volume are but a small sample of many thousands of notable blind persons in history. Most of the information about their lives comes from secondary sources. Where feasible, some of the subject's own words were used.

Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative engages with the cultural meanings and movements of blindness. This book addresses how blindness is lived in particular contexts—in offices of ophthalmology and psychiatry, in classrooms of higher education, in accessibility service offices, on the street, and at home. Taking the form of a play written in five acts, the narrative dramatizes how the main character’s blindness is conceived of in the world and in the self. Each act includes an analysis where blind studies is explored in relation to disability studies. This work reveals the performative enactment of blindness that is lived in the public as well as in the private corners of the self, demonstrating how blindness is a form of perception. Devon Healey’s work orients to blindness as a necessary and creative feature of the sensorium and shows how blindness is a form of perception.

Challenges visuality as the dominant mode through which we understand gender, social performance, and visual culture

This book presents the early existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger as a way to reformulate academic disability studies and activist disability politics. It redresses the almost categorical neglect of human difference in the philosophy of Heidegger. It proceeds by applying a revised version of his phenomenology to social policy aimed to get disabled persons to work and to methods in rehabilitation science intended to be more ‘client friendly’. Phenomenological philosophy is extended to the topic of disability, while, at the same time, two key concerns facing disability studies are addressed: the roles of capitalism in disablement, and of medical practice in the lives of disabled persons. By reframing disability as a lived way of being in the world, rather than bodily malfunction, the book asks how we might rethink medicine and capitalism in democratic ways. It aims to transform Heidegger’s work in light of his troubling politics to produce a democratic social theory of human difference.

Our bodies are not fixed. They expand and contract with variations in diet, exercise, and illness. They also alter as we age, changing over time to be markedly different at the end of our lives from what they were at birth. In a similar way, our attitudes to bodies, and especially posture—how people hold themselves, how they move—are fluid. We interpret stance and gait as healthy or ill, able or disabled, elegant or slovenly, beautiful or ugly. In Stand Up Straight!, Sander L. Gilman probes these shifting concepts of posture to explore how society’s response to our bodies’ appearance can illuminate how society views who we are and what we are able to do. The first comprehensive history of the upright body at rest and in movement, Stand Up Straight! stretches from Neanderthals to modern humans to show how we have used our understanding of posture to define who we are—and who we are not. Gilman traverses theology and anthropology, medicine and politics, discarded ideas of race and the most modern ideas of disability, theories of dance and concepts of national identity in his quest to set straight the meaning of bearing. Fully illustrated with an array of striking images from medical, historical, and cultural sources, Stand Up Straight! interweaves our developing knowledge of anatomy and a cultural history of posture to provide a highly original account of our changing attitudes toward stiff spines, square shoulders, and flat tummies through time.

Collects over one thousand entries that provide insight into international views, experiences, and expertise on the topic of disability.

This book addresses the limits of medicine by examining two mirror-image debates in tandem.