Dramatizing Blindness

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.

“In dramatizing blindness, Devon Healey raises the curtain on blindness, revealing a creative potential rarely, if ever, seen. In five acts, Healey re-moves blindness from the wings of the stage of everyday life, placing it center stage and relegating the culture of sight to its rightful place as backdrop. Read this book.” (Rod Michalko, PhD author of The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness (1998); The Two in One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness (1999); The Difference that Disability Makes (2002); and Things are Different Here (2017))

“In this triumphant merging of disability and drama, Blindness takes centre stage, offering a unique and unputdownable text that will be essential reading to anyone with an interest in the human condition.” (Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies and Education, University of Sheffield, UK)

“Disability dramatics have constituted a problematic cultural presence for centuries.  Many of those terrible traditions are subverted by Dr. Healey in this truly original and deeply informed engagement with the literary representation of blindness.” (David Bolt, Director of the Centre for Culture & Disability Studies, Liverpool Hope University, UK)

“Through a ‘theatre of the eyes,’ Devon Healey sets the stage to witness the drama of our own self-understanding, moving us to imagine blindness differently. In a profound artistic engagement with her own blindness, Healey narrates everyday life so as bring the reader in touch with the meaning of blindness as creative encounter. (Tanya Titchkosky, Professor, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, University of Toronto, Canada, and author of Disability, Self and Society (2003), Reading and Writing Disability Differently (2007), and The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (2011))

“This book adds to the growing cannonof blindness studies and charts new territory in disability life-writing. Devon Healey explores the many ways that blindness is performed and perceived in everyday life with her keen observations of the nuanced and overlapping narratives of disability that affect both the actor and the audience. The five acts of this drama are by turn theoretical and playful, deeply personal, and acutely aware of the world beyond the self.” (Georgina Kleege, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

“Adjusting to vision loss as a subject often lacks an exploration of the nuance. It's so much more than what was lost. Examining the experience through a creative lens allows us to see blindness as opportunity. What a refreshing concept. As a producer of a podcast geared to those adjusting to becoming Blind, I find the author's approach exciting and integral in any conversation about Blindness, especially for those new to the experience.” (Thomas Reid, Host& Producer, Reid My Mind Radio)

 “Dramatizing Blindness is a smart, creative, and thought-provoking experimental memoir that pushes past old stereotypes of blind people as pitiful. It invites sighted and blind readers alike to consider factors other than a medical condition as forces to be reckoned with.” (Catherine Kudlick, Professor of History and Director, Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, San Francisco State University, USA)

Devon Healey is Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada. She has published papers in The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.